Swamp News
Microwaves, budgets, bans, ultimatums, health care, and the ubiquitous lies—it’s been a wild ride through The Swamp this week! FYI, make a note to yourself that some dictionary definitions are under revision. “Wiretapping” now “covers a lot of different things,” according to Trump and means “broadly surveillance and other activities,” according to lexicographer Sean Spicer. “Mercy” also has new definitions, which are not yet clear, but Paul Ryan will keep us up to date on that during the coming months. It takes a while for print dictionaries to reflect popular usage, so you’ll want to remember these in order to be in the know on what’s happening in The Swamp.
Here’s Week 8 at a glance:
- On Saturday, the House Intelligence Committee gave Trump the ultimatum to put up or shut up about his wiretapping claims, and his deadline was Monday. Well, as expected, Trump neither put up nor shut up. At the Monday press briefing, Sean Spicer did his usual imitation of a pretzel, saying Trump was referring to surveillance in general, not wiretapping specifically, and that he was referring to the administration, not just Obama—even though the last of the three tweets calls Obama a “bad (or sick) guy.” During subsequent press conferences this week, Spicer has called attention to the quotation marks around “wires tapped” and “wire tapping” in the first two tweets as evidence that a broader interpretation of the terms was intended.
- Opposition to the Republicans’ proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act—the American Health Care Act, or AHCA—continues to mount, with Democrats in congress forming a solid block against the bill and an increasing number of Republicans joining the opposition. Paul Ryan can’t afford to lose more than 21 Republican votes to have any hope of passing the bill; and as of mid-week, 37 Republicans are “publicly expressing grave concerns,” according to the Washington Also, 12 Republican senators have criticized the bill, so even if Ryan manages to sway votes in the House, it seems unlikely to pass the Senate. This would, of course, be good news if we were not already shell shocked by the upsets of the past year and the grim knowledge that the most unlikely things can happen. You know, like electing a fascist as “president.”
- On Monday afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office released its anticipated report on the AHCA, and it contained no good news. According to the report, 14 million Americans who currently have health care would become uninsured by 2018, 21 million by 2020, and 24 million by 2026. This report has reinforced the perception that the AHCA is really a budget plan masquerading as health care because of the effects its passage would have on the federal economy. The CBO estimates that the bill would greatly reduce federal deficits over the next decade, with the majority of the savings coming from scaling back Medicaid and eliminating the ACA’s subsidies for nongroup health insurance.
- On Tuesday, Rachel Maddow showed us the first two pages of Trump’s federal tax returns ever to be publicly revealed. It wasn’t much, just the summary pages of his 2005 return, which was mailed anonymously to investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. Without the attachments, the two summary pages don’t tell us a whole heck of a lot; but it’s a start, and Rachel Maddow and others are issuing an open invitation for more leaks.
- On Wednesday, just hours from the time Trump’s second travel ban was set to take effect, two federal judges—one in Hawaii, one in Maryland—ruled to block enactment of the order. The judges cited Trump’s own words from the campaign, in which he emphatically promised to ban all Muslims. According to the judges, those words belie his current assertions that this ban has nothing to do with religion. Never one to be deterred by facts and details, Trump has vowed to take his fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. See you in court, Donald!
- On Thursday, the White House released the 2017 budget outline, which didn’t offer too many surprises but which underscored the depth of ignorance, hypocrisy, and outright cruelty that dominates Trump World. The $1.1 trillion dollar budget outline proposes increasing defense spending by $54 billion and paying for that increase by reducing allotments for the State Department, the EPA, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In addition to these reductions, other federally funded programs would be eliminated: Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other “nonessentials.” In the most obscene proposal possibly ever included in a federal budget, the Community Development Block Program, which operates Meals on Wheels, would be eliminated because the program “has not demonstrated results.” And then White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney called this compassionate. (Add “compassionate” to your list of words to be updated in the next dictionary revision.) Thursday night on MSNBC, Tom Perez stated emphatically, “Budgets are moral documents.” I agree, and any “president” who expects tax payers to fund his golf weekends and maintain two separate residences for his family but who’s okay with cutting out meals for homebound seniors is unspeakably immoral.
- On Thursday, after a two-week wild-goose chase, the Senate Intelligence Committee—along with the speaker of the House and the ranking Democrat on the committee– issued a statement that they’ve seen no evidence to support Trump’s ridiculous claim that President Obama ordered a wiretap on Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Never one to be deterred by pesky facts, however, Trump has not retracted the claim; and his faithful lackey Sean Spicer gave a particularly contentious press briefing in which he valiantly attempted once again to defend the indefensible. CNN’s Jim Acosta was the casualty in this week’s battle with the people’s enemy. Friday update: Add the UK to the list of countries the Trump administration has now p—ed off. Desperate to protect himself, Trump suggested that Obama may have had UK’s GCHQ help him out with his alleged surveillance of Trump. Theresa May is not amused and has said through her spokesman that the claims are ridiculous and should be ignored.
- Michael Flynn was back in the headlines on Thursday, not that he ever went very far away. We’ve learned that he raked in a cool nearly $70 million from Russian speaking engagements and other services in the months immediately preceding the 2016 election. It’s important to note that even before Flynn became a member of Trump’s team or was appointed as his national security adviser, as a U. S. military officer, Flynn was prohibited from accepting gifts from foreign governments.
- Trump threw himself another love fest on Wednesday of this week, this time in Nashville, Tennessee. Still campaigning more than four months after winning the election? He obviously is better at campaigning than at governing, so why not? And there’s nothing like the adulation of a chanting, screaming crowd to put the spring back in your step after a week of defeats and criticism by those mean media people. He told the crowd that the judge’s order blocking his second travel ban makes us “look weak,” that the first ban was better anyway and is the one he really wants to enforce, that he wants to “cut the hell out of taxes,” and that the “catastrophic” Obamacare “is gone.” And just for old times’ sake, he attacked Hillary Clinton, and the crowd gratified him with the familiar chant “Lock her up!” I guess this is that presidential behavior we’ve been hearing about that was hiding inside him all along, waiting for the appropriate time to make the pivot.
- Then just as the tumultuous week was screeching toward a close, we learned on Friday afternoon that Tom Price, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, “came under scrutiny during his confirmation hearings for investments he made while serving in Congress” (Huffington Post). The Huff Post article goes on to say that he “traded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of shares in health-related companies, even as he voted on and sponsored legislation affecting the industry.” These actions may have violated the STOCK Act of 2012 as well as the Emoluments Clause of the constitution. Oh, and guess who was investigating Price’s case. Remember Preet Bharara, the U. S. attorney Trump fired last week? Yeah, him.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the current Republican insanity is their insistence that our country must be returned to its roots as a Christian nation. Those of us who stayed awake during history class know that the United States has never been a theocracy and that, in fact, our founders took care to prevent the establishment of a state religion by writing the Establishment Clause into the first amendment to our constitution. But even if we cut the Repubs a little slack on their recall of history, one would think that anyone attempting to create a “Christian nation” would first take the trouble to find out what Christianity is. Apparently that’s another of those words whose definition is currently in flux, because taking meals away from homebound seniors, taking health care away from people who do the most grueling work but barely make a living, and cutting funding for Planned Parenthood and the EPA (which takes care of things like clean water) doesn’t strike me as “caring for the least of these.” Paul Ryan’s “mercy” is what many of us would call cruelty, depravity, and moral corruption.
Stay strong! Make your voice heard! This is what it means to be Americans.