Chuck Them Out
A leadership unfit and ill-equipped to lead
Let’s quickly get this out of the way — the Signal group leak from the White House is obviously the big domestic story of the week. The Democrats should ride it for as long as they can, keeping it in the news cycle and maybe collecting some consequences from the Trump administration. I’ll be covering it in the slop below.
But I’m not quite ready to move on from Senator Chuck Schumer and his handling of the continuing resolution (CR) fight.
And neither should you.
Here’s why:
The first significant test for the Democratic Party and its “resistance” to Trump and the Republicans was this funding bill. Typically a continuing resolution is a stopgap measure, that works to continue the agreement of the previous year’s allocation of government funds. This happens when the president and Congress fail to agree on regular appropriations bills. It lasts for a limited period of time, either until an agreed upon date or the next regularly scheduled appropriation bills come up.
All in all, that would in theory sound…okay? I mean, this has happened before and increasingly so in recent years to avoid a government shutdown.
Except, this wasn’t your typical continuing resolution bill. Instead of merely continuing the last agreed upon allocation of funds — that would have been dated back to the Biden administration — the Republicans in the House pushed through a significantly altered funding bill, a scenario that Schumer thought would not come to pass.
While the spending levels are operating under the fiscal year of 2024, no specification were made for how those funds were to be spent. In other funds, by voting to break cloture, a handful of Democrats gave the right-wing an assist in allowing Trump to make the argument that he can direct funding to institutions as he wishes.
To nicely button this point, the passage of the funding bill can also potentially bolster legal arguments justifying Trump and Elon Musk’s slashing, firing, and dismantling of government agencies. There are ongoing court cases about Trump’s bypassing of Congress’s hold on the power of the purse, and their control over how and where funds get distributed.
But now that Congress has collectively shrugged at the appropriation part of the funding bill, Trump can make the case that he has been empowered to treat the funding of the government as a blank check.
Schumer’s argument here is twofold. (1) there were no good choices and a government shutdown would have been worse, giving Trump more power; and (2) they will fight Republicans later in the year when the vote comes up for reconciliation.
On point two, let’s deal with that right away. Under a reconciliation bill, you only need 50 votes plus the Vice President to mark its passage. Despite Schumer’s insistence during gym workouts with Republicans, it is unlikely that four members of the GOP will “come around” to curtailing the Trump administration. It is not 2018 anymore, and Musk is pointing a money cannon at any Republican lawmaker who opposes Trump’s agenda.
Here is the issue with point one; it is true that a government shutdown would have provided Trump an avenue to pick and choose which agencies to keep open. However, Trump and the Republicans are right now choosing what agencies to shutdown through Musk’s farce of an “agency” with DOGE. Things are breaking down, but they’re still happening slowly compared to what a government shutdown would have produced. Basic functions of our government would have ceased and more scrutiny would have fallen on what the Republicans are doing with government spending. This is a point Schumer — perhaps unintentionally — conceded in string of disastrous interviews with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Instead of materializing more public animus towards the ruling party and perhaps attempting to extract a muzzling of Musk’s wrecking of the federal government, the Schumer got nothing for their capitulation.
This point is underscored when the largest federal workers union — the people whose day-to-day living literally relies on the government continuing to function — said that Democrats should oppose the funding bill.
Instead of heading that message, Schumer and nine other Senators have helped the right codify Trump’s ability to slash and deteriorate the government, the very thing that Schumer is pretending he helped mitigate.
What’s the upshot here then? As I indicated before, the Democratic Party’s leadership is not only decrepit in age, but in ideas. When things go wrong, they look to join the race to the bottom and whack-a-mole against different disadvantaged groups as an explanation for their failures.
Over the next 4 years, there will be endless opportunities for people like Schumer to performatively show their opposition to the Republicans. They will signal that “this is not normal,” hoping people forget with time their material capitulation.
Don’t forget is the message. The big crowds of people turning out in a non-election year shows that people are still ready for something real to believe in. There’s no reason to settle for stale crumbs lying on the floor.
The Democratic Party Senators that voted to help pass the right-wing funding bill are Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Catherine Cortez Masto, John Fetterman, Brian Schatz, Dick Durbin, Gary Peters, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and Angus King (independent).
For more analysis on this funding bill vote, I recommend reading Jeet Heer’s article in The Nation and David Dayen in The American Prospect.
White House Slop
Now this slopfest of a story: the debacle of the Signal group chat from the White House continues to fall out.
Key details:
In what has been called a breach of security, White House officials — including JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth — used Signal, a group texting app, to discuss war plans for a bombing campaign in Yemen against the Houthis. Using the app is a breach in protocol, as it is an unsecure messaging service and a potential violation of federal record-keeping laws.
To make matters worse, added to this group chat was editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg — an even greater breach of security.
Goldberg initially did not release all of the group’s messages — deeming some information as possibly classified material. But when Trump officials, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, claimed no classified information was revealed in the chat, Goldberg released more of the messages in the chat. Ostensibly calling their bluff.
In those messages, it showed Hegseth providing “the exact timings of warplane launches and when bombs would drop.” In one exchange, officials gleefully celebrate the bombing of a building belonging to an alleged member of the Houthis, mentioning it was his girlfriend’s residence. The White House has claimed that there have been no civilian causalities, which given the disclosed information in the chat, seems improbable.
German news website, Der Spiegel, published that through using the Signal app, the private data of Trump officials had become accessible online.
All of this is happening in the backdrop of the United States opening up a bombing campaign against Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
My viewpoint:
The Democrats should run with this and extend the cycle as much as possible. There is still a chance that someone might get fired for this massive screw-up. National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, seems like the best candidate. That said, this story in my view does have a shelf life. It certainly is not what will galvanize people to mobilize against the Trump administration going forward, nor is it as compelling as an anti-oligarchy message that has been resonating with rank-and-file voters. That said, for now the pressure should stay on.
U.S. Slop
As Trump’s assault on immigrants and college students continues, it is important to recognize where some of this is stemming from. The more reactionary elements of our political apparatus — and this one goes to both parties — have aggressively pushed for mask bans to be put into place. Those mask bans are in effort to curtail, intimidate, and ultimately silence free-speech when it comes to political protests. I mention this because on Wednesday, masked federal officers approached a Turkish Tufts University doctoral student, Rumeysa Ozturk, and detained her. Almost as if they were a secret police. From there, they transferred Ozturk from her Boston home to a Louisiana detention center before a court could rule on it. No charges or evidence were presented to support this detention, one that Marco Rubio has already said led to her visa removal (along with hundreds of others according to him, again with no legal justification behind it).
To add further insult to injury, these masked federal officials detained Ozturk as she was walking to the school's interfaith center to break the Ramadan fast at an iftar dinner.
There is no good version of this behavior. No supporting the outcomes, but not the conduct. These are thuggish and authoritarian maneuvers that will not abate once some unmarkable goal is achieved. It must be opposed with no preconditions or qualifiers. And those with political power or leverage that in any way lend credence to it are throwing all of us off of a first amendment cliff.
See video of Rumeysa Ozturk’s detention here.
Due to DOGE’s cuts, the Social Security Administration is falling apart; their website has crashed four times in 10 days in March. - The New Republic
Columbia student hunted by ICE can’t be detained for now as she fights deportation, judge orders - AP
How Donald Trump Throttled Big Law - The New Yorker
World Slop
One of the co-directors of the Oscar winning documentary “No Other Land,” was reportedly attacked by Israeli settlers and then detained by the Israeli army, this past Monday in the West Bank village of Susiya. Hamdan Ballal, who accepted the award on March 2nd, was released later on Tuesday. According to Yuval Abraham, another co-director of the film, Ballal was also beaten while in detention. Witnesses also reported masked and armed settlers attacking members of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence group.
This past Monday, two Palestinian journalists, Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour, were killed by Israeli army in Gaza. Israel had alleged Shabat of being a militant with no evidence presented. At least 162 journalists have been killed during the war in Gaza; 69 journalists were killed in the entirety of World War II. Most recently, Shabat had also been publishing for Drop Site News, an independent news website founded by reporters Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim. Shabat’s final dispatch for the website can be read here.
In Gaza, protests have occurred the past few days against the ongoing destruction of the area. The protests took aim at Hamas and Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign against them. Protesters can be heard saying “Hamas out!” 21-year old student, Eslam Rafat, called for “an end to the war, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
World Central Kitchen announced that a one volunteer was killed and six others were injured after an Israeli strike hit an area just as meals were being distributed.
Canada PM Mark Carney says old relationship with US 'is over' - BBC
Heartwarming Slop
U.S. representatives evidently were in Greenland, speaking to the locals, and gauging their openness to meeting with Usha Vance, Vice President Vance’s wife. Reportedly, the residence of Greenland declined the invitation.
Elise Stefanik had her nomination pulled for UN ambassador. This was due to concerns that the special election to fill her would-be replacement could flip to the Democrats, endangering the Republicans’ narrow majority in the House. On one hand, the possible pick-up for Democrats would have been nice. On the other hand, it is also nice to see a low-life like Stefanik face this public embarrassment after doing everything within her power to get rewarded with this position in the past few years.
If govt were to shut down, Trump would have the legal power to decide which agencies, fed employees are not essential and there would be no legal recourse against this. But now, DOGE firings and cuts can be challenged in court. And employees have been rehired…