<Senate Democrats staged dramatic showdowns to protest nominations during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office. This time around, Democrats are shifting tactics, reluctant to pick endless battles with Trump Cabinet picks that are unlikely to succeed.

It’s a careful tightrope for a party that is still reeling from losing the White House and Senate in the November elections, but one that many Democrats believe reflects the underlying reality of the situation – voters picked Trump despite all of their party’s warnings and attacks against him. And Democrats may need to win over some of those very same voters to find their way out of the political wilderness.

“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.

Now, Democrats are looking to implement a deliberate and disciplined strategy in Trump’s second term: pointing out the places where they could work with a nominee when they see fit and forcing Republicans to defend Trump’s picks when a nominee faces ethics questions, has a history of controversial statements or doesn’t have what Democrats view as the necessary qualifications for the job.

“We have to acknowledge something even if we are disappointed that’s true: Trump won. He is the president. We have to accept that,” Sen. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, said. “We are going to approach this in a very straightforward way. President Trump won. He has a right to nominate his Cabinet members. Our approach will be to give him the benefit of the doubt but not a blank check.”

Some Democrats have already been clear they may be open to voting for some of Trump’s picks even if they’ve sparred with them before. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told CNN earlier this month he would “absolutely” vote to confirm his one-time political rival Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead a key health care agency as long as Oz “agrees to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare,” offering up praise for his qualifications as a doctor and even saying he would “have a beer with the dude.” And several Democrats said they are looking forward to backing their colleague Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to be the next secretary of state.

During Trump’s first term in office, Democrats, in some instances, used procedural or tactical hurdles to delay votes in committee, something which can backfire quickly.

Democrats won’t back away from made-for-TV moments during public confirmation hearings as they look to drive a wedge between Republicans on issues or past statements that nominees have made. But several Democrats CNN spoke to said they are also reticent to needlessly delay confirmations or “play games,” knowing that doing so could risk a GOP backlash and could embolden Trump to use what are known as recess appointments, essentially bypassing Congress altogether.

Democrats stress that a measured approach shouldn’t be mistaken for Democratic support for Trump’s most controversial picks. In the course of conversations with more than a dozen Democrats, members and aides said it’s clear that some of Trump’s most contentious picks from Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense to his Director of National Intelligence selection, Tulsi Gabbard, are unlikely to win over many of their members. But Democrats believe their only real strategy to move the needle on these candidates is to give their GOP colleagues space to make the decisions about their futures on their own and not engage in partisan battles just for the sake of the exercise.

Democrats are also acutely aware that they will be in the minority and Republicans have a comfortable three-seat margin.

“Sometimes all you can do is create a record that shows people ‘Ok, this is what you are getting,’” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, told CNN.

The Senate Democratic caucus is diverse and represents an ideological spectrum. As a result, there will won’t necessarily be one singular unified strategy. Some members may pursue divergent approaches or differ in their opinions. But based on interviews with multiple members and aides it’s clear that many in the party believe a new approach is needed after Democrats lost to Trump a second time.

During the first Trump administration, Democrats staged a surprise boycott of the Senate Finance Committee to deny Republicans a quorum to vote to advance the nominations of Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as Democrats argued they needed additional information about the nominees’ finances and business practices. Democrats similarly used procedural hurdles in the Senate Judiciary Committee to force Republicans to reconvene one day later to vote on Jeff Sessions to be the attorney general....>

<....At the time, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Democrats for the moves, saying, “It is time to get over the fact that they lost the election..none of this is going to lead to a different outcome.”

“I can’t predict what tactics may be adopted. I personally would be inclined to show up for committee meetings, not the private committee of a forum. That’s just my personal inclination,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said.

For committees, a key question emerges with Trump shifting norms Democrats are also clear they won’t cease reminding voters of the ways Trump and his incoming administration are defying precedent if they decline to have nominees undergo FBI background checks. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer penned a letter to incoming GOP leader Sen. John Thune insisting that Thune maintain the process of confirming nominees, including FBI background checks.

Schumer wrote that the Senate should work “in a bipartisan fashion to process each nominee by reviewing standard FBI background-investigation materials, scheduling hearings and markups in the committees of jurisdiction, and considering nominees on the Senate floor.”

Democrats are grappling with how much they need to do behind the scenes if Trump’s transition team follows through with their suggestion they won’t have nominees go through the normal FBI vetting process.

“It is not like we can substitute the work of the FBI,” one Democratic source told CNN on background to discuss internal deliberations.

While each committee has slight variations in how it is briefed on the background reports or uses their contents, members have largely argued that more information – not less – is essential in backstopping their decision of whether to support a nominee. Democrats warn that with some of Trump’s picks having never worked before in government, the checks are even more essential, especially as questions have been raised about the past behavior of some, including Hegseth, who was accused in 2017 of sexual assault. Police did not press charges and Hegseth has denied the incident was an assault.

Others suggested the question of whether Democrats engage in their own vetting is still very much up for discussion.

“There have to be investigations so whether it’s the FBI or our committee staff, there have to be,” Kaine said while acknowledging “It can be challenging” especially as Democrats are seated to lose power over those committees in a matter of weeks.

Democrats will remain in the majority until January, but unlike the FBI, which is well versed in conducting the nominee background checks, committees would have to stand up a plan for an investigation and execute it in short order.

“We shouldn’t do that. We should get the FBI background check,” Welch said.

In the end, Democrats say they are going to stay flexible, recognizing some of the strategy is going to be born of organic and unforeseen circumstances in the months ahead.

“I don’t think there is an overall answer. (Trump’s) labor nominee is for example very different than his nominee for the Department of Defense and the approaches should be tailored to the individual nominees,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. “Democrats are here to carry out our Constitutional duties to advise and consent. To do that, we need our FBI background checks, an opportunity to meet with the candidates and then to ask them questions in open hearings.”>

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) seems to want a “blanket pardon,” and that has her critics all asking the same question: Why?

Greene was among many critical of President Joe Biden for pardoning son Hunter Biden.

The conspiracy theorist lawmaker on Tuesday accused Democrats of playing “the pardon game” and said “we should do the same thing.” President-elect Donald Trump, she added, “can just blanket pardon all of us too.”

Greene was reportedly one of at least five lawmakers who sought pardons from Trump before he left office in 2021.

“I heard that she asked the White House counsel’s office for a pardon,” Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the House Jan. 6 committee in 2022.

Greene at the time dismissed that as “gossip and lies.”

Hunter Biden’s pardon on Sunday came after he was found guilty in a firearms case and pleaded guilty in a tax case.

Greene responding with a call for a “blanket pardon” had her critics wondering: Why would she need any pardon at all, much less a “blanket” one?>

Got an answer to the question, <kid>?

<Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) called on his GOP colleagues in the House to band together to push through President-elect Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda come January, but predicted there would be “fireworks” if congressional Republicans don’t figure things out soon.

The comments came Tuesday during Roy’s appearance on The Benny Show podcast, where he lashed out at lawmakers in his own party who haven’t embraced the full scope of the MAGA agenda and who he sees as not doing their part “to clean out the entire system.”

“That’s why I supported RFK, that’s why I support people who want to blow this system up,” Roy said. “Right, start back over. Go back to the founding principles. But if I hear one more Republican tell me I’ve got to get in line to be a team player – I don’t want to be a part of a team of losers – I want to be on a team that wants to win and deliver for the American people.”

Roy continued to deliver his message to Republicans on Capitol Hill during a discussion with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson about how the party plans to move forward once they control the House. But the MAGA congressman wasn’t done taking Republicans who don’t share his same MAGA-inspired perspective to task.

“We have a Republican conference that is not committed fully to doing what the president campaigned on and that they grabbed his coattails to be dragged across the line to get a razor-thin majority, which the House would’ve lost but for President Trump’s coattails,” he said, adding: "So, we’ve gotta actually deliver and I don’t think right now Republicans know what that means.”

He concluded by calling for congressional Republicans to come together this month to work on a blueprint for moving forward.

“I’m just telling you, when the rubber meets the road, there’s going to be some fireworks if we don’t find a way as a Republican conference to get in a room and figure all this out,” Roy said.>

<Go @#$% your neighbor's dog again perfidious.

<You may have been tempted to believe Donald Trump when he swore, along with some of his Republican colleagues, to protect Social Security. If so, the joke may be on you.

That concern emerged Monday when Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) uncorked a tweet thread on X labeling Social Security "a classic bait and switch" and "an outdated, mismanaged system."

Twenty-three minutes after Lee posted the first of his tweets, it was retweeted by Elon Musk, who has been vested by Trump with a portfolio to root out inefficiencies in the government. Musk led his retweet with the comment "interesting thread"; if that wasn't an explicit endorsement, it matched his way of amplifying others' tweets, tending to give them credibility within the Musk-iverse.

Lee's tweet thread, along with Musk's apparent concurrence, serves as an outline of the arguments the GOP may use to undermine faith in Social Security, the better to soften it up for "reforms" that will translate into costs imposed on the retirees, disabled workers and their dependents.

I recently reported on all the ways that Trump could quietly or secretly undermine his pledge to protect Social Security. Lee's thread and Musk's apparent endorsement are different — they amount to a frontal attack on the program.

While delving into Lee's screed, we should keep in mind that he's a leader of the cabal with the knives out for Social Security. As I've reported, during his first successful Senate campaign in 2010, he unapologetically declared, "It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots.”

Lee said that was why he was running for the Senate, and added, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

So here he is, right out of the box.

Lee's attack has four basic components. One is to bemoan the fact that Social Security is funded mostly by a tax, which he asserts the government can use for any purpose — not necessarily to cover retirement and disability benefits.

Another is to point out that the program's reserves aren't stored in individual accounts with workers' names on them, but collected in "a huge account called the 'Social Security Trust Fund.'"

A third is to claim that "the government routinely raids this fund ... They take 'your money'” and use it for whatever the current Congress deems 'necessary.'"

And a fourth is to complain that the trust fund is mismanaged: "If you had put the same amount into literally ANYTHING else—a mutual fund, real estate, even a savings account—you’d be better off by the time you reached retirement age, even if the government kept some of it!" He states: "Your 'investment' in Social Security can give you a return lower than inflation."

None of these is a new argument — they've been swirling around the conservative and Republican fever swamp like a miasma for decades. They've been consistently refuted and debunked. Lee can't be unaware of that. Some of his arguments have a tiny nugget of truth at their center, but in his hands are twisted and manipulated out of recognition. Consequently, we can label his claims for what they are: Lies.

Let's examine them one by one. (I asked Lee via a message at his office to justify his tweets , but haven't heard back.)

Yes, Social Security is funded by taxes. So what? Lee's salary as a senator is funded by taxes, too. Does that make it illegitimate? It's true that once a tax is collected Congress can decided to spend it however it wishes. But it's also true that the payroll tax was enacted jointly with the provisions of the Social Security Act that designated the revenue for Social Security benefits.

As Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1937, writing for the majority in a 7-2 opinion upholding the constitutionality of Social Security, it was clear that Congress intended the payroll tax to fund the benefits, for lawmakers "would have been unwilling to pass one without the other."

It's proper to note here that no one has ever proposed diverting Social Security revenues for any other purpose without recompense — except Republicans such as Lee. George W. Bush proposed converting Social Security into private accounts, which would have been tantamount to such a diversion — and a gift to Wall Street money managers eager to get their hands on the program's trillions of dollars.

But Bush's 2005 privatization plan was stillborn and he quickly abandoned it....>

<....But Bush's 2005 privatization plan was stillborn and he quickly abandoned it.

It's also true that the program's revenues aren't stored in individual accounts but in the trust fund. That's right and proper: Social Security is a shared benefit; no one can know in advance what any worker's benefits will be. They're pegged to career earnings, but low-income workers get higher benefits relative to wages than higher-income workers. They're also related to a worker's personal and family situation — spouses, dependents, health and so on.

It also makes sense to invest the program's revenues in a shared account, because large investments tend to perform better over time than those under the control of individuals, not least because that minimizes transaction costs.

That brings us to the notion that the government "routinely raids" the trust funds (there are two, actually — one to cover old-age benefits and the other to cover disability payments — but they're generally treated as a single combined fund). The trust funds currently hold about $2.8 trillion in assets, all invested in U.S. Treasury securities.

Holding a T-bond, as anyone with a slightest knowledge of government fiscal policy is aware, means the bondholder has lent the money to the government, which can use it for any purpose Congress chooses and which must pay interest on the bond. Over the years, the government has used the money to build roads and other infrastructure and provide services. Using the borrowed money for these purposes allows the government to do so without raising income taxes, which would hit the wealthy harder than middle- or low-income Americans.

Lee should ask his well-heeled patrons if they'd prefer to pay higher taxes because the government couldn't borrow from the Social Security reserves. Anyone have any doubts about how they'd answer? Me neither.

In any event, the financial transactions related to the buying and redemption of the program's treasury holdings are fully disclosed every year by the program trustees in their annual report.

What about Lee's assertion that investing in "ANYTHING else—a mutual fund, real estate, even a savings account," would make you "better off by the time you reached retirement age." This statement is as solid a compendium of financial ignorance as one might wish, even coming from a U.S. Senator.

To begin with, if Lee thinks the Social Security trust fund should be invested in something other than treasuries, he can take that up with his colleagues on Capitol Hill. They're the ones who have mandated, by law, that the trust fund can be invested only in treasuries. Over the years, proposals to widen the portfolio have been raised and abandoned, for several reasons. Some were concerned about the potential conflicts of interest inherent in a government program investing in the stock market; others that the returns from market investments are too volatile.

Savings accounts? Is Lee kidding? The rate on savings accounts offered to the average customer of Bank of America, to choose a commercial bank at random, is 0.01% a year. As I write, a 10-year treasury bond yields about 4.2% annually.

As for Lee's assertion that "Social Security can give you a return lower than inflation," the fact is that Social Security benefits are adjusted for inflation every year. They're also lifetime benefits. Try to find an annuity plan that pays inflation-adjusted benefits for the life of the annuity holder and his or her spouse — for all but the richest people, it would be unaffordable or at least uneconomical.

Lee also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about Social Security as a program. It's not just a retirement program, but a combined retirement and insurance program.

Disabled workers — and their dependents — are entitled to benefits well beyond their contributions; the families of workers who die before retirement age receive benefits that include payments to children through age 17 — through age 18 if they're in school. If those benefits were based on the balances in a worker's individual account, then the families of those who have suffered untimely deaths could amount to a pittance, running out while still needing help.

Lee concludes by urging his followers to "acknowledge the truth: Social Security as it now exists isn’t a retirement plan; it’s a tax plan with retirement benefits as an afterthought." This is an outright falsehood. As it now exists, Social Security isn't just a retirement plan, but a disability program. It's funded by taxes, but to call retirement benefits "an afterthought" is so wrong it's frightening.

<6. No trolling.

You've been a busy beaver today Missy.

Or would you like to stand up and out one of your dirty colleagues?

20+ FTB posts were deleted today (still counting). Apparently not one of your pal z troll master's posts has been deleted. Nor was z suspended as so obviously deserved for pursuing FTB on page after page after page. Trolling gone amuck, and CGs punishes the troll's victim, like a bad cop arresting the robber's victim instead of the robber.

A shining example of the double triple quadruple standard of unfairness that exists on CGs. Susan needs to hire some new operators in the worst way.>

<A couple of weeks ago, my kitchen started to smell like sewage. The garbage disposal began to drip. The dishwasher wouldn’t drain. The toilet bubbled when my kids emptied the kitchen sink.

At first, I thought the root problem was the broken disposal. But we fixed that and the kitchen still stank. Maybe it was the dishwasher? No, the dishwasher was fine. Only then did I call a plumber, who immediately knew what the problem was: “Your drainpipe is clogged. We see it all the time.” A guy came over to bust the clog. Problem solved.

I had a mental model of what was wrong in my kitchen, but my mental model turned out to be bad. That’s only natural: I’m a lawyer, and not a handy one. The plumber had a good mental model. He’d seen the same constellation of symptoms before. He made a sharp guess about the root cause, and he knew how to fix it.

I thought about mental models when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy released an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal making their first major statement about the soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In some ways, I liked what I read. I share their conviction that government has become too bureaucratized, rigid, and slow. I agree that radical change is needed.

Musk and Ramaswamy smell the same crap that I do. But I fear they’ve got a bad mental model about what’s wrong. They think we’ve got too many civil servants—their equivalent of the garbage disposal. They aren’t paying nearly enough attention to the clogs in the drainpipe, including the finicky legal and procedural rules that will predictably frustrate their reform efforts. Unless they change what they’re up to, I doubt they’ll make much progress.

In Musk and Ramaswamy’s telling, the chief problem with the administrative state is that it’s full of unelected mandarins who force their diktats down the throats of a reluctant public. Worse, those bureaucrats often act without legal authority from Congress. They adopt regulation upon regulation without regard to their costs, blithely unconcerned about the drag they’re placing on the economy.

If that’s your model, going to war against the bureaucrats makes sense. And that’s what Musk and Ramaswamy aim to do—with, they seem to expect, the help of the Supreme Court. They promise to quickly rescind the regulations adopted by hyperactive officeholders. With fewer rules on the books, they say, there will be less need for bureaucrats to enforce them, providing a justification for “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy.”

For support, they point to two recent Supreme Court cases, Loper Bright v. Raimondo and West Virginia v. EPA. In the first, the Court overturned the doctrine of Chevron deference. As a result, the federal courts will no longer defer to agencies when those agencies interpret ambiguities in the laws that they administer. In the second, the Supreme Court admonished the EPA after it adopted a creative approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Only Congress, the Court said, can resolve “major” economic or political questions.

Musk and Ramaswamy believe that “these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.” They want to target “illicit rules” adopted in the prior, more permissive regime.

Sure, agencies sometimes push the legal envelope. And those cases tend to attract headlines, which is why they shape our thinking about the administrative state. They are the exception, however; agencies have clear legal authority to adopt most of the rules they’ve adopted.

A few days after Loper Bright came down, for example, the National Park Service banned bear baiting under a law telling it “to conserve … the wild life” of the parks. It’s very hard to see anything “illicit” about such a routine exercise of delegated power. The U.S. Code is full of delegations like this because Congress doesn’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to establish every detail of government programs. Instead, it writes general laws and instructs agencies to fill in the specifics. And agencies still get deference, even under Loper Bright, when they act within “the boundaries of th[eir] delegated authority.”

That describes most of what agencies do. Last month, for example, the IRS adopted new rules about tax credits for new semiconductor facilities under the CHIPS Act. Why? Because Congress told the IRS to “issue such regulations” as needed to carry out the law. Last Wednesday, the National Marine Fisheries Service adopted a rule limiting the sardine catch in fisheries off the Pacific Coast. The agency had similarly unimpeachable legal authority to do so.....>

<....Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of dumb rules. It’s just that most of those rules are squarely within their agency’s remit. Although that doesn’t make them any less dumb, it does mean that pointing to Loper Bright and West Virginia v. EPA won’t help get rid of them.

What’s more, Musk and Ramaswamy get it backwards when they say that the cases give them extra powers to undo existing regulations. In fact, the cases constrain their authority. Imagine that an agency, for example, has an old rule on the books that is based on an interpretation of the law that DOGE dislikes. Before Loper Bright, the agency could have changed that interpretation so long as the new interpretation was also “reasonable.” The agency was free, in other words, to toggle between different ways of reading an ambiguous law.

After Loper Bright, toggling is verboten. An agency that has already adopted the soundest interpretation of a law can’t change its mind. It’s stuck. If the agency were to try to adopt a new reading of the law—perhaps one that DOGE prefers—and to use that to justify rescinding the rule, the courts would stop the agency. Saying that Loper Bright gives DOGE flexibility is about as sensible as saying that handcuffs help when throwing a baseball.

Much as DOGE might wish it were otherwise, rescinding a rule requires agencies to go through a cumbersome, multiyear rule-making process. Working to streamline that process would be a terrific mission for DOGE, and I hope Musk and Ramaswamy pursue it. Instead, they said that they’ll take a shortcut: The president will simply “pause the enforcement of those regulations” while they’re being reviewed.

A unilateral pause won’t be as helpful as Musk and Ramaswamy seem to think. Many businesses, especially big businesses, have to certify their legal compliance to government agencies—most notably via financial reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where false certifications can trigger criminal penalties under Sarbanes-Oxley. Few will feel comfortable ignoring rules that are still on the books just because DOGE tells them they might someday be rescinded.

What’s more, you need smart bureaucrats to make sure that rescissions hold up in court. Under settled law, established way back in the Reagan administration, “an agency changing its course by rescinding a rule is obligated to supply a reasoned analysis for the change.” Compiling that analysis requires technical skills that agency bureaucrats will have and that DOGE will lack. Slashing the federal workforce will thus work at cross-purposes to deregulation.

Blanket nonenforcement is also, well, not so legal. As the federal courts have said, “An agency’s pronouncement of a broad policy against enforcement poses special risks that it has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.” When that happens, the courts—with review up to the Supreme Court—are likely to intervene.

Will they? Musk and Ramaswamy seem to think that the Supreme Court will be a foot soldier in the war they hope to wage on the bureaucrats. Again, I think their mental model is off. Six of the justices are conservative, that’s true. It’s also true that those justices have reservations about the size and scope of the modern administrative state. In general, though, the Supreme Court’s preferred approach to keeping agencies in check has been to insist on procedural fastidiousness.

That’s not a passing fancy or a political spasm. It’s a cornerstone of the conservative legal movement, which is committed to the view that the courts must stand as a bulwark between the excesses of federal agencies and the public. The justices may like Donald Trump’s policies, and they may go somewhat gentler on those policies than they did on Joe Biden’s. They are unlikely, however, to abandon their commitment to the scrupulous enforcement of procedural rules to cater to his whims.

Wishful thinking also characterizes Musk and Ramaswamy’s approach to cost cutting. In their op-ed, they seem to appreciate that more than half of all government spending comes from entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. They likewise admit that only Congress—not DOGE—can shrink those programs. Nevertheless, they think they can make substantial headway because of “the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end.”

They’re right about the waste, fraud, and abuse. I hope they tackle it. The trouble is that, in their apparent mental model, making those cuts will be easy, because no one likes waste, fraud, and abuse. On that, they’re mistaken....>

<....For a characteristic example, look at how Medicare pays for drugs. When physicians dispense (say) a chemotherapy drug in an outpatient facility, they’re allowed by law to bill the government for 106 percent of the drug’s average sales price. Because 6 percent of a big number is more than 6 percent of a small number, physicians have a huge financial incentive to prescribe the most expensive drugs, even when a cheaper and equally effective alternative is available. That helps explain why Medicare drug spending has exploded, growing an average of 9.2 percent a year from 2008 through 2021.

I’d call that wasteful. Would oncologists? Back in the Obama administration, Medicare proposed changing the statutory formula to make it mildly more sensible. Unusually, Medicare has broad legal authority, conferred in the Affordable Care Act, to do so by legal fiat. Nonetheless, the attempt fell victim to an intense lobbying campaign from hospitals and doctors.

The point generalizes. The health economist Uwe Reinhardt called it the Cosmic Law of Health Care: “Every dollar of health spending is someone else’s health-care income, including fraud, waste and abuse.” If you really wanted to cut federal spending, you wouldn’t declare war on bureaucrats. You’d declare war on hospitals and physicians. Does DOGE have the stomach for that?

If not, Musk and Ramaswamy’s claim that they will reduce government spending by “impoundment” won’t come to much. Their idea is that Trump could simply refuse to spend some of the billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated. A Nixon-era law called the Impoundment Control Act prohibits the president from doing so; Musk and Ramaswamy insist that the law is unconstitutional—and that the Supreme Court would agree.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Trump’s allies have tried to build the legal case to support this constitutional argument, but it’s both untested and unpersuasive. Congress’s powers are at their zenith when it comes to federal spending on domestic programs. As early as 1838, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president can refuse to spend money as Congress has directed: “To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible.”

In any event, if all of this spending is so unpopular, why not pass a law to cut it? Republicans will hold the White House and both chambers of Congress come January 20, and the Senate filibuster is no impediment to spending cuts. Yet going to Congress is not Musk and Ramaswamy’s style. They want to “driv[e] change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

That dismissive attitude toward Congress betrays the limited scope for DOGE’s reforms. It also replicates the problem they say they want to fix—that unelected people (like, ahem, Musk and Ramaswamy) are making law instead of elected officials. If they really believed what they’re saying—that “our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government”—Congress would be at the center of their plans, not an afterthought.

DOGE may make progress on selected problems, of course. Musk and Ramaswamy are dead right, for example, that the civil service is in desperate need of fixing, and that Trump has an unusual degree of freedom to rethink it. The procedures that apply to federal hiring are Kafkaesque, and firing civil servants is next to impossible.

Even there, however, Musk and Ramaswamy seem to care only about the firing part, and not about the hiring. That’s a problem. As the economist Tyler Cowen has written about the administrative state, “dismantling it, or paring it back significantly, would require a lot of state capacity—that is, state competence.” If Musk and Ramaswamy have ideas about how to bring the best and the brightest into government, they’re not sharing them.

Maybe Musk and Ramaswamy can pivot. Maybe they will be more creative, daring, and capable than I expect. For now, however, it looks to me like they are coming at the problem with the wrong mental model and a half-baked belief that they can achieve change through sheer force of will. I admire the ambition, and I share their concern about government dysfunction. But I fear they have no clue how to fix it.>

<Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chair of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency alongside billionaire Elon Musk, has a lengthy history of attacking his partner’s ties to China, frequently referring to Musk as a “circus monkey” and a puppet for the Chinese Communist Party.

Ramaswamy’s critiques, reviewed by CNN’s KFile, include pointed remarks about Musk’s 2022 suggestion that Taiwan should become a special administrative region of China, a stance aligned with Beijing’s interests and one that drew praise from Chinese officials.

Tesla’s investments in the Chinese market and Musk’s comment on Taiwan have drawn fierce criticism from Ramaswamy, who argued the Tesla CEO was pandering to the Chinese Communist Party for business benefits, such as regulatory approvals and tax breaks.

“I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China,” Ramaswamy said in May 2023 when discussing the carmaker’s decision to build a battery plant in Shanghai.

“I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” Ramaswamy added, referring to the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China.

Tesla is deeply reliant on China, with deliveries from its Shanghai facility accounting for more than half its global sales in 2023.

In their collaboration within the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk and Ramaswamy share a goal of cutting federal regulations and reducing the federal workforce. But Musk’s role as the leader of companies with lucrative government contracts has sparked concerns about his potential conflicts of interest.

Ramaswamy’s own words could be used by critics to question Musk’s role as a government cost-cutter, given how much his own companies have benefited over the years from billions of dollars in government contracts and assistance.

“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding, either through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX,” Ramaswamy said in 2022 on a Fox News podcast.

Though Musk, the world’s richest man, and Ramaswamy, himself a millionaire, are both seen as friends of Big Tech, the two have divergent views when it comes to China. While Musk has recently favored closer ties, Ramaswamy has called for an economic decoupling from China.

As a presidential candidate in the 2024 GOP primary, Ramaswamy was often critical of US economic ties to China. While he claimed other companies such as Apple and Black Rock were enabling and making political concessions to China, he often singled out Musk for some of his harshest criticism.

“Elon Musk has, I think, demonstrated his willingness to change his political tunes based on the favors that he gets to be able to do business in China,” Ramaswamy added on the 2022 Fox News podcast.

CNN’s KFile reviewed Ramaswamy’s comments on Musk when looking into how the two might operate DOGE, the nongovernmental entity. Trump proposed creating a government efficiency commission as part of his economic plans unveiled in September, claiming it could save trillions by eliminating fraud and improper payments within six months.

Trump’s statement last month announcing the creation of DOGE quoted Musk as saying that “this will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Ramaswamy separately responded on X with a slogan he often used during his presidential campaign to call for the elimination of federal agencies, writing: “SHUT IT DOWN.”

But Ramaswamy’s sharp critiques of Musk’s ties to China, all made within the last two years, have received little attention. Given how persistently he criticized Musk, the comments raise questions over how the two intend to work together.

Musk, through a spokesperson, declined to comment...>

<....Ramaswamy said his past attacks on Musk came before they had ever met.

“We aired some of these issues the first time we spoke,” he said in a statement. Along with crediting Musk for taking “extraordinary risks against his financial interests,” Ramaswamy told CNN the two know each other well now. “I love him and respect the hell out of him, and I’m proud to call him a friend. The only country he puts first is the same one I do: the United States of America.”

On a number of occasions, Ramaswamy pointed to Musk’s Taiwan comments as an example of tailoring his political positions to appease the Chinese government, drawing a direct connection between Musk’s comments and Tesla’s business benefits.

“He got a nice ‘attaboy’ on the back, a little pat on the back when his Shanghai factory and regulator in China gave him a nice little tax break within days after him having made that comment about Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in another interview in 2022.

Musk reportedly told Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang in May 2023 that Tesla was against the notion of decoupling, instead referring to the interests of the US and China as “intertwined like conjoined twins.”

Ramaswamy criticized Musk’s comment in multiple posts on X.

In one lengthy post targeting Musk in May 2023 he wrote, “the U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

“Now the crusader for ‘free speech’ (@elonmusk) kisses the ring of the world’s biggest censor: Xi Jinping,” he wrote in another June 2023 tweet.

Ramaswamy echoed those comments multiple times in 2023 and 2022.

“I do think it is a kinship that Tim Cook and Elon Musk probably have, is that they both bend the knee to the true overlord, which is Xi Jinping,” said Ramaswamy in 2022, mentioning Cook, Apple’s CEO.

“This is what China’s recognized, is that US companies will jump; if Xi Jinping says ‘jump,’ they’ll say, ‘How high?’” he said in another comment mentioning Musk in June 2023 on Fox News.

In a July 2023 interview, Ramaswamy also labeled US companies’ dependence on China a “great threat” to the US and argued Musk’s push to advance electric vehicle manufacturing has made America less competitive on fossil fuel production.

“And by the way, all this is for an electric vehicle movement that is about actually – in part – subsidizing a form of behavior in the United States that leaves the US less competitive when it comes to fossil fuel production, as well as fossil fuel utilization. And by the way, constraints that don’t apply in China in the same way,” he said in May 2023 on his podcast.

Despite recent subsidies to lower the cost of electric vehicles, the US remains the world leader in fossil fuel production, pumping a record 13.4 million barrels of crude oil a day this year.>

<South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol may give Donald Trump some bright ideas.

Why not shut up the critics, in Congress and the media, by declaring martial law when the going gets tough?

Trump is making so many zany appointments that he’s likely to bump into his first real obstacles when a few Republicans in the Senate have the guts to defy him and insist on full-dress hearings before approving all his picks. Trump, of course, would prefer the gimmick of “recess appointments,” enabling him to sneak his favorites into top jobs while the Senate is in recess. Thus, he would avoid the embarrassing, agonizing process of hearings by a Senate committee eager to show why many of them are thoroughly unqualified.

But with a bare majority in the House and not much of one in the Senate, Trump should not have a lot to worry about until the next mid-terms, in 2026, when he faces the prospect of losing his hold over both houses of Congress.

This is when things could turn south—he could channel Yoon in declaring the equivalent of martial law if Congress refuses to do his bidding.

“The US Constitution allows for the suspension of habeas corpus which is in effect martial law,” David Maxwell, a retired U.S. army special forces colonel, reminds the Daily Beast. “That is a presidential decision and one which he will make based on his assessment of the threat to the constitution and the nation.”

Having shown zero tolerance for the most well-meaning of critics, Trump would no doubt be more than happy to resort to that stratagy if the next Congress were dominated by Democrats.

Trump, though, might face one seemingly intractable problem—the armed forces over which the president is commander-in-chief. In South Korea, after the National Assembly voted down Yoon’s martial law decree, the armed forces withdrew.

“When the people’s representatives spoke, the military sided with the legislature and the people, not with the executive,” Maxwell notes. “The Korean and U.S. constitutions are constructed with the express purpose of preventing a dictator. That is what republican government is all about”—that is, republican with a small “r.”

Not to worry, though. Trump is not burdened by such atavistic precepts. He did not hesitate to fire his first defense secretary, the retired marine general Jim Mattis, and pillory the chairman of the armed forces chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, one of his strongest critics. We can be sure he will name friends and allies to those posts despite the embarrassment of his first choice for defense secretary, the alleged womanizer and Fox News talking head, Pete Hegseth.

Trump has long since shown his disrespect for the principles of balance of power, much less “republican” government. He survived two impeachments at the close of his first term, confident his foes would never summon the two-thirds vote needed in the Senate for a conviction. He would not hesitate to risk another impeachment by a Democratic-controlled lower house, confident the Senate would again not convict him, regardless of which party had the majority.

Trump’s offenses, moreover, are sure to be far more serious than anything Yoon imagined before incurring the wrath of the Korean assembly, where 200 of its 300 members must vote to impeach him. The vote then goes to the country’s constitutional court, six of whose nine members need to uphold the impeachment motion before he loses his job....>

<....Trump, having weathered most of the felony charges that might have jailed him, is sure as president to betray America’s commitments to its allies while sucking up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, with whom he kindled a bromance when they met in 2018 and 2019. Could he not face charges of treason, of betrayal of trust, of yielding to America’s worst enemies undermining, betraying, American commitments from Ukraine to Taiwan to Korea?

For Trump, a coup against subordinate elements in the American government, and the American system, would fulfil a dream on the way to de facto dictatorship. Yoon set an example by suddenly imposing martial law, without discussing the idea with his closest associates, but he failed by withdrawing the decree six hours later after the National Assembly rejected it. Had he had truly dictatorial instincts, he would have made sure the soldiers surrounding the assembly building captured the dissident legislators and stopped the voting.

Trump might learn from Yoon’s mistakes.

“I’d guess the disastrous blowback from Yoon’s unwise impulsive move will be a pretty strong cautionary,” Nicholas Eberstadt, long-time author and expert on Asian issues at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Beast. That is, he adds, “if Trump were tempted to do something like this in the first place.”

For Trump, the temptation will be overwhelming. He has already broken laws by attempting to subvert the “stolen” 2000 [sic] election with false claims of corruption. The next step would be to control all three branches of government, staging a coup d’etat against Congress as needed to rule as the first true U.S. dictator.>

<Elon Musk’s growing criticism of President-elect Trump’s opponents and industry competitors is raising concerns he may use his increasing influence to intimidate adversaries.

These fears are compounded by Trump’s repeated vows for revenge against his perceived enemies, with experts warning Musk could echo and carry out the same rhetoric on his social media platform, X, in the coming months.

“Musk is a good fit for Trump because Musk clearly enjoys … vengeance and gets off on retribution,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University.

“This is partly, at least, what animates him, maybe even more so at this point than his business enterprises.”

Neither X nor a spokesperson for the Trump transition team responded to The Hill’s request for comment.

Concerns were amplified last week after Musk went after retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who became an outspoken critic of President-elect Trump after testifying in his first impeachment trial.

“Vindman is on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States,” Musk wrote on X, responding to comments Vindman made in an interview about Musk’s reported conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Musk said Vindman, who served as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC) under Trump, “will pay the appropriate penalty,” to which Vindman responded, “You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.”

Some Democrats rallied in defense of the combat veteran, including Vindman’s twin brother — Rep.-elect Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), who called Musk’s comments “really false and defamatory.”

In another message to Musk, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said the “Vindman family embodies patriotism and public service. You know nothing about either.”

While Trump has remained mostly mum about Alexander Vindman in recent years, Musk appears to be using his immense platform, where he has more than 206 million followers, to reignite the retaliatory tone.

“It’s hard to think of anyone else who has been at least in the past year or six months, more high profile, more influential in terms of their public support of Trump,” Dallek said.

“Musk, the richest person in the world, has put much of his sources and his bully pulpit behind Trump.”

“What does he [Musk] do with that massive platform? Well, he names government officials who he says he wants to fire,” he added.

Alexander Vindman was ultimately removed from the NSC in 2020, two days after the Senate acquitted Trump, who called him a “Never Trumper” in 2019.

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General later found Eugene Vindman likely faced retaliation from the then-president’s officials for his role in the impeachment.

Alexander Vindman is not the first political figure to be called out by Musk and other Trump allies.

Last month, Musk wrote special counsel Jack Smith’s “abuse of the justice system cannot go unpunished,” mirroring threats from Trump and some Republican lawmakers to retaliate for what they believe were politically motivated cases.

Smith spearheaded the Justice Department’s election interference case and classified documents case against Trump, both of which he moved to dismiss following the president-elect’s victory last month.

And shortly before the election, Musk told advisers that his political action committee, America PAC, should challenge “Soros DAs,” in reference to progressive district attorneys backed by liberal mega-donor George Soros, The Washington Post reported.

In a repost of an X user listing “six Soros-backed District Attorneys facing reelection” in 2025 or 2026, Musk wrote “interesting” and tagged America PAC’s account. This included Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who criminally prosecuted the president-elect in a hush money case earlier this year.

Musk has also singled out on social media federal employees who are well outside the political fray.

Last month, Musk reposted a user who zeroed in on a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and posted her name and salary.

Musk’s repost, writing “So many fake jobs,” has more than 33 million views, and the named woman apparently shut down her social media accounts, CNN reported.

He also singled out a senior adviser to climate at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in another repost that listed her name and title.

“He has a huge platform and anytime you do, we’ve seen what type of bluster and misinformation and just spiteful, hateful rhetoric has had on, not just our elections, but on our society as whole,” Democrat strategist Kristen Hawn told The Hill....>

<....“The impact that his words have in general, given his platform, and also given his influence within the White House,” is “certainly” enough to have ramifications, Hawn added.

“Even by making a threat, even by the very act of intimidating someone like Vindman or these government officials already does a lot of damage,” Dallek added. “It already has a big impact, because those people then become targeted. They become targeted by Musk’s followers, by Trump’s, the MAGA [Make America Great Again] movement.”

The impact of retaliatory rhetoric by Trump and his allies has already been seen with some of his critics, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who said she received death threats after she broke with House Republicans and backed Trump’s impeachment.

Like Trump, Musk has crossed ways with some of his competitors in the tech and space world when it comes to his own endeavors.

His often-public spats with competitors, along with his new government advisory role with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) panel, has some concerned he could yield his influence to unfairly suppress competition.

Musk is “not some altruistic person here,” Hawn said of the millions he poured into the election. “He clearly sees the benefit of being this close, spending all this time at Mar-a-Lago.”

“And being this close to the president-elect and having the responsibilities given to him by the president that could potentially impact not just government spending, but the workforce,” she continued. “That is concerning, because he has his own objectives.”

Leading the DOGE panel, Musk will be responsible for making recommendations to reduce government spending and regulations in various sectors, including the agencies that have federal contracts with his companies SpaceX and Tesla, along with other leading tech agencies.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told The Wall Street Journal he has fears over Musk’s new ties to Trump.

“It just makes me nervous in general, the way I have seen Trump make decisions … and certainly Musk as well,” he told the Journal. “Musk clearly has influence now.”

Musk has taken particular issue with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, whom he accused of manipulating him into supporting the artificial intelligence (AI) endeavor by convincing him it would develop safe and transparent AI.

He has an ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly abandoning its founding principles as a nonprofit to become a for-profit company.

Altman on Wednesday said he was “tremendously sad” over his tension with Musk and pushed back against suggestions the billionaire will use his allyship with Trump to harm OpenAI.

“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” he told the New York Times DealBook conference.

Musk also repeatedly clashes with Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin, a direct competitor of SpaceX.

The two went back and forth last month after Musk claimed Bezos told others to sell their Tesla and SpaceX stock under the presumption Trump would lose the election. Bezos denied the claim.

Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dined with Trump last week at his Mar-a-Lago resort in what was seen by many as an attempt to court the president-elect ahead of his second term.

Trump seemingly changed his view on the Facebook founder after he chose to withhold an endorsement during the 2024 presidential election.

For his part, Musk famously challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match last summer and shared social media jokes mocking billionaire Mark Cuban, who backed Vice President Harris in the presidential race.>

<Is that your <Razzle Dazzle Defense> stone scree ore lie???

What a big fat @#$%* lie from zanzibar, no surprise to regular readers, paragraph after paragraph. A deliberate, contrived misstatement on <sfod>'s part.

That personal vendetta line, short and sweet, is a deliberate mischaracterization so often used by z's longtime partner in crime, perfidious. zanzibar is a touch-move like Hamas, the murderous, kidnapping terrorist organization who cries foul, foul! Give us food, give us water, give us sanctuary even though we did horrible, unspeakable, horrible things to your peaceful people in the park, in the streets, in their yards and homes, and took some of them hostage; still holding some hostage. FTB worships a Jew of Israel, the Son of David, the victim of crucifixion for the forgiveness of sin and fulfilling of prophecy long before arrival.

FTB calls it "setting the record straight -- RETRIBUTION" for zanzibar's non-stop trolling, harassment, dishonesty. (A truly teeny-tiny minuscule squabble compared to the real-life Middle East. Such a parable is likely over zanzibar's head, as FTB is confident that z being a typical misinformed error-prone American couldn't draw a line on the map from Syria to Lebanon to Egypt without touching Gaza or the West Bank without the aid of an atlas or cheating with a cell phone but z has minecraft all memorized.)

The troll z legend 000000010 and so many, many other sock puppet disguises has more than earned the focus on this ongoing scheme of hatred and chaos, and enjoys the disruption of peace, the negative attention. It gives z an excuse to be a litterbug all across these pages. zanzibar wants you to feel sorry for z truth 0000000800.

FTB's full response is coming. You <sfod> will get hit hard as usual. You <sfod> really should shut up and MYOB while you're behind, because there is much to expose like Oprah and Epstein. Your blunders stick out like sore thumbs over the years as FTB chuckles over your <Kash Patel> chess ignorance aided by the unethical operator in charge who was quick to remove in but minutes the exchange between my new friend <Mr. President> and Fredthebear but turned out to be a blessing by contributing mightily to the foolishness of <sfod> still on display for the world to laugh at.

<Over the last month, we’ve woken up to many stories that sound a lot like this one, from the New York Times: “The Democratic Party emerged from this week’s election struggling over what it stood for, anxious about its political future, and bewildered about how to compete with a Republican Party that some Democrats say may be headed for a period of electoral dominance.”

But that piece was actually published on Nov. 7, 2004 — 20 years ago.

That doesn’t mean the story was wrong then or that the same notion is wrong now. It just means that the battle isn’t to figure out how to win the last war, but to win the next one.

The reality is that there is a need for Democrats to understand and learn about what happened in the 2024 election and how it can, and should, affect our approaches to the future. But the important part is focusing on approaches to the future.

So as Democrats in Washington and around the country prepare for a second Trump administration and Republican-controlled government, there are a few things we can do right now to drive down support for the GOP agenda and position ourselves to start winning again.

First, talk about “betrayal” instead of touting “resistance.” After the 2016 election, Democrats needed to show that there was still a heartbeat and build momentum for opposition to Trump’s agenda. But while that was successful and important then, Trump’s support has only grown. His low watermark was 46 percent of the vote in 2016. Even at the height of the pandemic in the 2020 election, he was backed by 47 percent of voters, and now by more than 49 percent in 2024. Our challenge this time isn’t to demonstrate the resistance; it is to reveal the betrayal.

Congressional Dems trying to put ‘best foot forward’ in battling Trump: Sherman Trump’s agenda — from higher costs on everyday goods, to tax breaks for his billionaire buddies, to health care ripped away from young families with kids and seniors in assisted living — is not the agenda that his voters actually want. The very things he’s poised to undercut, like Medicaid, are important to the very people who elected him. You could see the first inkling of this on the day after the election, when Google searches for “tariffs” surged as people started to worry about what his presidency would mean. Democrats’ responsibility now is to show people how Trump’s agenda betrays the very people who put him into office — selling them out and leaving them behind.

Second, don’t say “I told you so.” Over the next months and years, there will be countless moments where people who supported Trump are worried about what he’s trying to do. We’re already seeing that from some Republicans in Congress, who are concerned about Trump’s unqualified Cabinet picks. Soon after the new administration takes power, we’ll start to see it from voters too. People will speak up about the damage that Trump’s agenda is doing to them, from Americans who lose friends to deportation to women who lose access to abortion.

But Democrats have to resist the temptation to say “I told you so” or “We warned you.” The worst possible way to persuade anyone to agree with you is to start out by telling them that they were wrong and you were right. Don’t try it, no matter how good it makes you feel or how many likes it gets you on social media.

Third, remember what they say about “sticks and stones.”Having observed Trump’s behavior on the national political stage for nearly a decade, we know he will say things that will concern us all. It was true the day he first announced his candidacy in 2015 and it was true at his Madison Square Garden rally just before the election — and every day in between.

But when voters feel like their lives are out of control and are focused on getting by day to day, they truly don’t care about what Trump says. In fact, when Democrats’ focus is on what he says (instead of what he does), we’re reminding those voters that we’re not focused on the things that they care about....>

<....It’s been true since grade school that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” If we want to persuade people, we have to focus on the harmful “sticks and stones” of Trump’s agenda, not the words.

Fourth, don’t own the status quo. About two-thirds of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track. Those numbers climb among the swing voters who decide elections. Regardless of whether Republicans have had total control of government (2017 to 2019), Democrats had total control (2021 to 2023) or government was divided (2019 to 2021 and 2023 until Jan. 20), Democrats have managed to make themselves the defenders of the status quo.

Democrats can no longer be the party talking about “protecting” the system of government or its institutions. We need no longer be the ones defending the status quo in an economic system that Americans feel is broken. When we say that we are here to “save democracy,” a large share of people wonder why we want to save something that doesn’t work for them.

We can be the party that is growing the economy so it works for working people, reforming health care so costs come down and fixing democracy so it delivers for constituents again. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater — but we’ve also got to stop taking a bath ourselves.

When that New York Times story was written in 2004, the party was in dire straits. Two years after it was written, the first woman ever became Speaker of the House. Two years after that, America elected its first Black president. And two years after that, the Affordable Care Act became law.>

'B-b-b-ut he's really good, so must be protected. If he were some 2200-type fish, I'da had him thrown to the wolves.'

<OK, you caught us. We've been employing a person who has been doing some really terrible stuff. But in our defense- he's really good at chess. Like, REALLY good at chess.

Just so we're all clear, we've known about this stuff for years. And rather than getting rid of the guy, we actually increased his access to minors. He's been really enthusiastic about working with kids, and we take care of our employees!

But let's also be clear that this wasn't your everyday "sexual harassment" or "sexual assault" or even "rape" stuff. (Though on the advice of our lawyers, we don't officially condone any of those acts.) This was more of the "get children drunk so that you can rape them" variety, with some violence against women thrown in for good measure.

But oh my gosh. Do you remember that time in 2013 when he almost won the US Chess Championship? He came in second on tiebreaks, but still. You have to be really good to do that. He beat Robert Hess!

Plus, come on. Jen Shahade? That woman? She wasn't even a minor when Alejandro did those things to her. She was probably asking for it. Or regrets it. Or made it up to get attention. Or was dressed too provocatively. (We'll just keep attacking her, because we've heard that's a great legal strategy).

But do you know why he had such unbelievable access to minors? He was a Grandmaster. Grand. Master. Do you know what that means? It means he won a LOT of chess games. So what if he was a grown man who liked hanging out alone with high-school girls? At night? In hotel rooms? And getting them drunk?

It's trendy to think that chess should be a safe place for women (and children). But do you know what chess really is about? The chess. Being really, really good at it. Or at least being so rich that you can pay to have grandmasters hang out with you.

Now that this story has been picked up by a national news outlet, it has become obvious we can't just wait out the storm and keep Alejandro on staff (believe it or not, that was our plan when the story broke on chess.com). So we at the St. Louis Chess Club (or US Chess Federation, because it's kind of both of us) have now cut ties with GM Ramirez.

Our official stance is that GM Ramirez' alleged actions are contrary to our educational missions- look at the new boilerplate we put up on the STLCC web site called "Policy on Relationships and Interactions with Minors"! Unofficially, however, many of us are still holding out hope that we can bring him back once the attention wears off. Assuming he doesn't go to jail.

We're sorry that you caught us employing a person like this. Our greatest regret is that you found out. But seriously, check out this game!!>

<Pete Hegseth is in trouble, and he can only blame himself. Although the Fox News personality and Army National Guard veteran said on Wednesday that he’s still fighting to become Donald Trump’s next defense secretary, allegations of rape and alcohol abuse could derail his chances — if Senate Republicans care. There’s plenty for them to oppose, if they’re willing to defy Trump, because accusations of misconduct have troubled Hegseth’s nomination almost from the beginning. In November, the Washington Post reported that he paid a woman who accused him of raping her, though he denies committing an assault and was never charged with a crime. Hegseth’s behavior had been questionable for years. The New Yorker later obtained a whistleblower report saying that Hegseth got so intoxicated during his time leading Concerned Veterans of America that he would sometimes have to be carried out of events. Hegseth “sexually pursued” female staffers, The New Yorker reported, whom Hegseth and others had divided into two groups: “the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’” He categorically denies these claims.

Even if the Senate fails to confirm Hegseth, he joins an unholy trinity as the third Trump nominee to face accusations of sexual assault. One, Matt Gaetz, withdrew as Trump’s pick for attorney general when it became clear the Senate would not confirm him after allegations that he had sex with a minor years earlier. The other is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been accused by a former babysitter for his children of forcibly groping her when she was in her 20s. The trio have much in common with the man who selected them. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll in 2023, and dozens of women have alleged sexual harassment or misconduct at his hands.

Misogyny is not some accidental byproduct of Trump’s celebrity and later political career. Instead, it is central to his allure. The president-elect cannot be a strongman if he does not manifest traditional masculinity in its most honest form. Paternalism can appear benevolent, but it is about power and control, and its supporters find a natural leader in Trump. He seems dimly aware of his value, and so does his inner circle; his successful campaign for reelection included direct appeals to disaffected young men, and the much-ballyhooed gender gap failed to defeat him. As he prepares to take power, he empowers an anti-feminist backlash that has, in turn, long motivated much of the conservative movement.

The project begins with men like Hegseth, who is hardly the first conservative whose misconduct is superficially at odds with his ideology. He has fashioned himself a defender of traditional values, even a protector of women. Women should not fight in combat, he has argued, and he praised them instead for their contributions as caregivers and nurses. “They carried the banner of safety, peace, and care,” he wrote in his most recent book, The War on Warriors. “They were mothers, sisters, and angels of combat.” Hegseth’s praise hides a knife: He has also said that women can expect trouble if they stray from their prescribed roles. “If you train a group of men to treat women equally on the battlefield then you will be hard-pressed to ask them to treat women differently at home,” he wrote in the same book.

Look closely, and Hegseth’s conservatism is a license to abuse and exploit women. He evidently understands where that permission can lead. As editor of The Princeton Tory, a conservative publication, he published a student who claimed that sex with an unconscious person was not rape. The column was publicized by Popular Information in November, and it argued that in order for an act to be rape, there had to be a lack of consent but also “duress,” which a passed-out woman could not experience....>

<....Hegseth still has defenders, including his own mother. Penelope Hegseth once told him that he mistreated women, writing in an email obtained by the New York Times that “on behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” Now that he’s at at the mercy of senators, she sounds quite different. In a Wednesday interview with Fox News, she said her son is a “changed man” and added, “I just hope people will get to know who Pete is today, especially our dear female senators.”

Conservative women have always been part of a permission structure that justifies and perpetuates misogyny; Hegseth’s mother is no different, and neither are the women who will fill out the Trump administration. Trump’s defenders will point to Susie Wiles, who will become the first female White House chief of staff in history when he takes office, or to Karoline Leavitt, who will be his press secretary, or perhaps to his wife, Melania, who has stood by the president-elect throughout his sexual abuse and misconduct scandals. Women know when they join Trump’s orbit that they’re laundering misogyny in the name of power or the pursuit of some ideological goal. Hegseth is merely the latest beneficiary of their efforts; Trump preceded him.

Whatever happens with Hegseth’s nomination, the fact that Trump persisted with it for so long is another reminder that his forthcoming administration will set women back. No one, not even the women who voted for Trump, will be entirely safe from its work. There is no task a woman can perform, no role she can fulfill, that will insulate her from the anti-feminist backlash that is already here. As Hegseth would no doubt remind her, not even military service is considered valuable enough to protect a woman from what an unrestrained conservative ideology will unleash. There are so many Hegseths. They might not be rich, or famous, but they are still dangerous. Now that they have a president in their own image, their fortunes are rising — to our detriment.>

<With the resolution of an incredibly close House race in California (Democrat Adam Gray unseated incumbent Republican John Duarte), we now know the major results of the 2024 balloting a month after Election Day. It’s a good time to set aside Republican spin claiming a massive landslide victory and Democratic rationalizations about this or that mistake changing everything, and just look at the numbers and the story they tell. As we will discuss, total GOP control of the federal government probably won’t last more than two years, and there are no particular signs of an electoral realignment down ballot. Republican triumphalism and Democratic despair are equally unmerited from the perspective of the election itself.

Trump’s win looks pretty normal

Looking just at the presidential results, the more you look at the numbers the clearer it is that Trump made solid but unspectacular gains compared to his showing in 2020. There is no way his victory over Kamala Harris can be credibly called a “landslide.” He did not win a national popular-vote majority (though he came close with 49.79 percent, according to the most complete results we have). His margin over Harris was 1.5 percent, which is smaller than the margin by which the victor won in every presidential election since 1968 (setting aside the two elections, in 2000 and 2016, when the popular vote loser won the Electoral College).

The popular vote win did, of course, show a marked improvement by Trump from his 4.5 percent deficit against Joe Biden in 2020, and from his 2.1 percent deficit against Hillary Clinton in 2016. The 2024 “swing” to Trump was not, the most recent election analyses confirm, principally a matter of odd turnout patterns afflicting Democrats who were unhappy with their party over this or that issue but disliked Trump as much or more; Democrats lost vote share to Trump, not to “none of the above.”

Trump won the Electoral College by a more decisive 312 to 226 margin, but that’s basically the same margin he won in 2016 and that Biden won in 2020. More to the point, a two-point swing to Harris in just three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, would have given her an Electoral College majority and the presidency.

Every bit of information we have reinforces the impression that recent inflation and pessimistic assessments of the economy were the killer issues for Harris. They were overwhelmingly the top concerns of swing voters, who also exhibited extraordinarily positive retroactive impressions of Trump’s performance on the economy during his first term. You can argue that her campaign failed to galvanize negative swing-voter feelings about Trump’s character and extremist associations, or that the vice-president might have somehow more sharply distinguished herself from the deeply unpopular president to whom she was lashed.

Republican Senate gains were mostly a reflection of a favorable landscape

Throughout the 2024 election cycle, no matter what was going on in the presidential race, the odds of Democrats hanging on to control of the Senate were consistently low, thanks to an unforgiving landscape. Democrats were defending eight vulnerable seats, three of them in states (Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia) sure to be carried handily by Trump. There were only three theoretically vulnerable Republicans; all of them were in safely red states (Florida, Nebraska, and Texas) and had big money advantages over their challengers.

In the end, Democrats predictably lost Senate races in deep-red Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia, and went 4-1 (winning in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin while losing in Pennsylvania) in the other five competitive races, all in states carried by Trump at the presidential level. Upsets did not materialize in Florida, Nebraska, or Texas. While the national Republican trend helped, it’s safe to say the landscape mattered most in producing the 53-47 majority Senate Republicans now enjoy.

House Democrats did well, and will be able to cause real problems for Mike Johnson Despite the adverse presidential and Senate results, House Democrats gained one net seat (two if the 2022 elections are the baseline) in 2024 balloting. Democrats won 40 of the 69 districts rated “most competitive” by the New York Times, and split the 22 races rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report right down the middle. They flipped three seats each in California and New York, mitigating to some extent the story line of Democratic crisis in deep-blue states.....>

<....The results means [sic] the narrow margin of control that caused a lot of problems for House Republicans during the last two years will be continued if not intensified, with Speaker Mike Johnson being able to lose just two votes on any pure party-line balloting in the House. There’s an even more perilous short-term situation as House members resign to accept positions in the Trump administration (two special elections for open GOP seats have already been scheduled for April 1 in Florida). Assuming Democrats stay united, there will be a powerful temptation among various House Republican factions to shake down Johnson prior to crucial votes, or even to break ranks entirely in anticipation of difficult midterm elections.

State results showed no major gains for either party

Whatever national wave Republicans could boast based on their presidential performance didn’t really extend to the state level. Neither party made a net gain in governorships, though Democrats did decisively win the most-discussed contest, in North Carolina. Among state legislatures, Republicans achieved no net gain in chambers controlled (though they did bust up Democratic trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota) and wound up with the same percentage of legislators overall that they had going into the election.

The most fiercely competitive state ballot measures involved abortion policy, with abortion-rights supporters winning seven (in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York), and their opponents winning three (in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, though the Florida abortion-rights measure did win a majority but failed to reach a super-majority threshold). Though the Florida outcome was a bitter disappointment for the largely Democratic pro-choice forces, their overall record in 2024 remained positive.

Looking ahead, neither party is a clear favorite Though a lot of currently unknown factors will determine the shape and intensity of the 2026 midterm elections, the odds are very good that Democrats will have at least one trophy in plain view: control of the House. In 20 of the last 22 midterm elections, the president’s party has lost a minimum of four net House seats, and an average of 32. Last time he was in office, Trump’s party lost 40 net House seats. From what we know of the new Republican regime’s plans for the next two years, it seems very likely that it will cash in a lot of political capital to achieve highly controversial policy goals, which almost always means a short-term loss of popularity. A lot of House Republicans are going to be walking planks on high-profile votes in 2025 that could be fatal in 2026.

On the other hand, Republicans would have to really screw up to lose control of the Senate in 2026; they will again benefit from a favorable landscape. While they must defend 22 seats, 21 are in states Trump carried on November 5; the other is held by Maine veteran Susan Collins, who regularly overperforms her national party. Fully 20 of the seats at risk are in states Trump carried by at least 11 percent in 2024. It will be a really hard nut to crack, particularly since Democrats will have to defend vulnerable senators of their own in Georgia (Jon Ossoff) and Michigan (Gary Peters). Since Republicans control the White House and the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote, Democrats would have to flip four seats to regain control. The 2028 landscape is significantly less slanted toward Republicans, but if they enter it with their current three-seat cushion (or more, depending on what happens in 2026), a flip will still be a tall order.

How about the big prize, the presidency, which presumably Donald Trump will be giving up in 2028? The good news for Democrats going forward is that in 2028 the Biden administration will be an increasingly distant memory, and Republicans will without question be held accountable for economic discontent, which is very likely to continue or even intensify. The GOP gains among Democratic “base” constituencies (especially Latinos and young voters) that received so much attention this year are most easily explained by short-term reaction to deeply negative economic perceptions rather than some fundamental alienation from the Democratic Party that we can take for granted going forward.

Even without factoring in the possibility that the new Republican regime in Washington will overreach and become quickly unpopular (which will almost definitely be the case if the massive cuts in non-defense federal spending the GOP is contemplating are enacted), there’s no particular reason to assume that J.D. Vance or some other MAGA inheritor will begin the 2028 presidential cycle as a favorite against a Democratic nominee who (this time!) will be chosen by an open primary process....>