Trump launches tax reform push as details still being worked out
By Jeremy Diamond
President Donald Trump on Wednesday will begin in earnest the effort of selling a sweeping overhaul of the tax code, pitching Republican plans as a boon for the middle class ahead of members of Congress' return to Washington.
But Americans who hear his speech in Springfield, Missouri, will learn little about what a new tax code will look like. GOP congressional leaders and the White House have yet to reach an agreement on the details of the tax plan and proposals are expected to go through congressional committees before the plan takes its final shape.
Trump's populist-aimed tax reform speech will seek to blunt anticipated Democratic criticism of the proposed reforms, which experts have said will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans.
Wednesday's speech is expected to be the first in a series of public events the President will hold to crank up the public pressure on Congress to get behind his tax-reform goals. Trump's focus will be on tax reform's benefits for middle-class Americans and small businesses and to make that pitch he will draw on Springfield's place in history as the birthplace of Route 66, known as the "Main Street of America."
Trump's attempt to frame the debate comes as he and his administration have raised the need for tax reform in fits and starts since the early days of his presidency. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin initially set the end of August as a timetable for passage of tax reform efforts and, in April, the administration released several topline numbers of its proposal. But the White House and Congress have failed to sync up in their ambitions for reform amid disagreements and as lawmakers remained stuck on failed efforts to repeal Obamacare.
Now, the White House faces a jam-packed fall legislative calendar that includes deadlines to avert a government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling -- and now added pressure to pass a disaster assistance package for recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
Trump's attempt to turn the national conversation to tax reform comes as the spotlight is firmly fixed on the disaster still unfolding in Texas and Louisiana, where hurricane damage and flooding continues to sending tens of thousands of people from their homes.
Trump made his first trip to Texas on Tuesday and is expected to return to the area on Saturday. A White House official said Trump would again address the disaster during his tax reform remarks.
Trump's first attempt at applying the bully pulpit to his tax reform push also comes on the heels of internal strife over the President's response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which prompted Trump's top economic adviser Gary Cohn -- who along with Mnuchin has helmed tax reform efforts at the White House -- to publicly rebuke the White House's response to the white supremacist rally there.
"I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities," Cohn told the Financial Times in a striking rebuke of a president by one of his top advisers.
Still, Cohn said he had decided to remain at the White House and administration officials have said he has remained focused on the tax reform push.
The Trump administration outlined the broad strokes of its proposal for tax reform in April, proposing slashing the number of tax brackets from seven to three and bringing the corporate tax rate down to 15%. It also called for income tax brackets to be set at 10%, 25% and 35% -- the latter for the wealthiest Americans, down from the current 39.6% rate.
But since the administration released that outline, it agreed to give the reins on tax reform to Congress -- working with leaders as part of the "Group of Six" to come up with a single Republican tax reform plan that leaders hope will earn broad support in Congress.
Still, Trump is expected to play a much more public role in driving support for tax reform, taking to the road more frequently to hammer the benefits of tax reform than he did during Republicans' failed effort to repeal Obamacare.
Tax reform was at the core of Trump's economic proposals during his campaign and aides said it's an issue Trump feels he can effectively pitch to the public.
August 30, 2017
Not about you!
Axelrod: It's not always about you, Mr. President
By David Axelrod
Article Two of the Constitution spells out the official duties of the presidency but not all its responsibilities. One of the essential, unwritten roles of the president has been to act as the consoler-in-chief in moments of crisis and loss, offering support and encouragement to fellow citizens on behalf of a concerned nation.
Reagan after the Challenger explosion; George W. Bush after 9/11; Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and Obama after Charleston.
Hurricane Harvey was Donald Trump's first major test in that role. Trump flew to Texas on Tuesday to meet with state officials and disaster response coordinators in a moment that called for the empathy and humanity befitting an ongoing, large-scale tragedy. Instead, we witnessed another dispiriting display of obtuse self-puffery.
Seated at a table between Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and first lady Melania Trump, the President launched into a monologue about the epic nature of Harvey -- "Nobody's ever seen anything like this!" -- with hosannas to his team - -and by extension, himself -- for the job they're doing in meeting it.
Turning to FEMA Director Brock Long, Trump gushed, "a man who's really become very famous on television over the last couple of days." And in wrapping up his remarks, he started to congratulate the group for their proficient handling of the storm, even as Houston and the surrounding region continued to be pounded by rain and floods.
Glimpsing the awkward reaction on the faces around him, the President quickly caught himself, adding, "We'll congratulate each other when it's all finished," but leaving little doubt that mutual congratulations eventually would be due.
The President then got a short, pro forma briefing for the benefit of the cameras and the group adjourned.
It appears at this juncture that the administration is working well with state authorities to deal with the crisis, at least as much as Harvey's magnitude allows. Yet, there is another demand the President completely missed.
Startlingly, he did not utter one syllable about those who have lost their lives, their homes or businesses in the floods that are still swelling over southeast Texas, overwhelming the heroic first responders and volunteers who are straining to meet its demands. He had no solace for the tens of thousands of evacuees, some of whom were separated from their families in the storm and are now warehoused in arenas, left to wonder what comes next.
Donald Trump swept into Corpus Christi on Air Force One. Never missing an opportunity to sell, he alighted with his trademarked USA cap atop his thatched dome. It was clear he had come to take a bow, not to offer sympathy for the victims or hope to the dispossessed.
For the ex-reality show star, the scene on TV is everything, and he apparently thought this exercise in praise-claiming amid the misery played "presidential."
Still, we have witnessed over the past few days many scenes of everyday people, risking their own lives to save their neighbors. These Americans have demonstrated a largeness of spirit and selflessness equal to the moment.
The President has not.
He just doesn't understand the role.
By David Axelrod
Article Two of the Constitution spells out the official duties of the presidency but not all its responsibilities. One of the essential, unwritten roles of the president has been to act as the consoler-in-chief in moments of crisis and loss, offering support and encouragement to fellow citizens on behalf of a concerned nation.
Reagan after the Challenger explosion; George W. Bush after 9/11; Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and Obama after Charleston.
Hurricane Harvey was Donald Trump's first major test in that role. Trump flew to Texas on Tuesday to meet with state officials and disaster response coordinators in a moment that called for the empathy and humanity befitting an ongoing, large-scale tragedy. Instead, we witnessed another dispiriting display of obtuse self-puffery.
Seated at a table between Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and first lady Melania Trump, the President launched into a monologue about the epic nature of Harvey -- "Nobody's ever seen anything like this!" -- with hosannas to his team - -and by extension, himself -- for the job they're doing in meeting it.
Turning to FEMA Director Brock Long, Trump gushed, "a man who's really become very famous on television over the last couple of days." And in wrapping up his remarks, he started to congratulate the group for their proficient handling of the storm, even as Houston and the surrounding region continued to be pounded by rain and floods.
Glimpsing the awkward reaction on the faces around him, the President quickly caught himself, adding, "We'll congratulate each other when it's all finished," but leaving little doubt that mutual congratulations eventually would be due.
The President then got a short, pro forma briefing for the benefit of the cameras and the group adjourned.
It appears at this juncture that the administration is working well with state authorities to deal with the crisis, at least as much as Harvey's magnitude allows. Yet, there is another demand the President completely missed.
Startlingly, he did not utter one syllable about those who have lost their lives, their homes or businesses in the floods that are still swelling over southeast Texas, overwhelming the heroic first responders and volunteers who are straining to meet its demands. He had no solace for the tens of thousands of evacuees, some of whom were separated from their families in the storm and are now warehoused in arenas, left to wonder what comes next.
Donald Trump swept into Corpus Christi on Air Force One. Never missing an opportunity to sell, he alighted with his trademarked USA cap atop his thatched dome. It was clear he had come to take a bow, not to offer sympathy for the victims or hope to the dispossessed.
For the ex-reality show star, the scene on TV is everything, and he apparently thought this exercise in praise-claiming amid the misery played "presidential."
Still, we have witnessed over the past few days many scenes of everyday people, risking their own lives to save their neighbors. These Americans have demonstrated a largeness of spirit and selflessness equal to the moment.
The President has not.
He just doesn't understand the role.
Planting trees...
“Trump Forest”: why environmentalists are planting trees to thwart the president
The crowdsourced forest is at 500,000 trees and growing.
Updated by Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna
Donald Trump has called global warming a Chinese “hoax” and has erroneously claimed that cutting emissions to avert catastrophic climate change will ruin the US economy. He plans to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement and is undoing many of the policies President Barack Obama put in place to fight climate change.
In short, he’s been a disastrous president so far for the climate.
Among those deeply vexed by the Trump administration’s attitude toward climate change are three environmentalists based in New Zealand, all in their 20s: a French-New Zealander entrepreneur named Adrien Taylor, a British climate scientist named Dan Price, and an American political scientist named Jeff Willis.
In January, they came up with an idea: Why not counter Trump’s inaction on climate by planting a proverbial “Trump Forest”?
“We know Donald Trump likes his name on things,” they cheekily wrote on their website. And the planet could use a lot more trees to sink some of the carbon in the atmosphere.
Originally, the idea was to plant a tree every time Trump uttered the words “climate change.” But that was nixed after it became obvious Trump rarely uses the words. (Various departments in his administration have even since discouraged or banned the term’s usage.)
On March 29, the group decided it was go time. The day before, Trump had signed an “energy independence” executive order with the message that climate change doesn’t matter to his administration. Included in the order was the intention to dismantle Obama’s signature policy, the Clean Power Plan.
So Taylor, Price, and Willis decided they would try to plant enough trees to make up for the greenhouse gas emissions that would occur without the Clean Power Plan.
In practical terms, that means 10 billion new trees, which Price says is a rough estimate for what would be needed to prevent 650 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. (That’s what an analysis in Nature suggests the Clean Power Plan would do if fully implemented over eight years.)
The organizers admit their goal of 10 billion trees “sounds ridiculous,” but they also insist that it’s not completely out of reach. In just the past four weeks, the number of trees planted or pledged increased from 50,000 to 500,000, according to the tally they update on their website every day.
Trump Forest doesn’t actually handle any money, and it doesn’t ever plan to. The founders tell me that they all have regular day jobs and have no intention to make anything off of Trump Forest. Instead Taylor, Price, and Willis say they simply wish to connect people who want to do something about the climate with reputable organizations that will help them plant trees.
While many of the tree-planters are American, they say they’ve also seen a lot of support come from Europe and other places. "People all around the world realize that we’re all going to pay for his [Trump’s] actions,” says Taylor, whose sustainable hat company Offcut Caps provided the first pledge of 1,000 trees.
“Obviously it’s a big challenge,” Price says of their goal of planting 10 billion trees. “We are looking to cover an area about the size of Kentucky or the North Island of New Zealand or Iceland,” he explains. “These aren’t huge areas, especially when you break them down by country. Split that between 200 countries around the world, and it’s not too bad.”
Unlike Trump Hotels, Trump Steaks, Trump Water, or the myriad other products with the Trump name on it, neither the president nor his family has a stake in Trump Forest. But the creators of Trump Forest say that they’d love if he found out about it, and they are keen to work out an arrangement should he be interested in endorsing their project.
The crowdsourced forest is at 500,000 trees and growing.
Updated by Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna
Donald Trump has called global warming a Chinese “hoax” and has erroneously claimed that cutting emissions to avert catastrophic climate change will ruin the US economy. He plans to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement and is undoing many of the policies President Barack Obama put in place to fight climate change.
In short, he’s been a disastrous president so far for the climate.
Among those deeply vexed by the Trump administration’s attitude toward climate change are three environmentalists based in New Zealand, all in their 20s: a French-New Zealander entrepreneur named Adrien Taylor, a British climate scientist named Dan Price, and an American political scientist named Jeff Willis.
In January, they came up with an idea: Why not counter Trump’s inaction on climate by planting a proverbial “Trump Forest”?
“We know Donald Trump likes his name on things,” they cheekily wrote on their website. And the planet could use a lot more trees to sink some of the carbon in the atmosphere.
Originally, the idea was to plant a tree every time Trump uttered the words “climate change.” But that was nixed after it became obvious Trump rarely uses the words. (Various departments in his administration have even since discouraged or banned the term’s usage.)
On March 29, the group decided it was go time. The day before, Trump had signed an “energy independence” executive order with the message that climate change doesn’t matter to his administration. Included in the order was the intention to dismantle Obama’s signature policy, the Clean Power Plan.
So Taylor, Price, and Willis decided they would try to plant enough trees to make up for the greenhouse gas emissions that would occur without the Clean Power Plan.
In practical terms, that means 10 billion new trees, which Price says is a rough estimate for what would be needed to prevent 650 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. (That’s what an analysis in Nature suggests the Clean Power Plan would do if fully implemented over eight years.)
The organizers admit their goal of 10 billion trees “sounds ridiculous,” but they also insist that it’s not completely out of reach. In just the past four weeks, the number of trees planted or pledged increased from 50,000 to 500,000, according to the tally they update on their website every day.
Trump Forest doesn’t actually handle any money, and it doesn’t ever plan to. The founders tell me that they all have regular day jobs and have no intention to make anything off of Trump Forest. Instead Taylor, Price, and Willis say they simply wish to connect people who want to do something about the climate with reputable organizations that will help them plant trees.
While many of the tree-planters are American, they say they’ve also seen a lot of support come from Europe and other places. "People all around the world realize that we’re all going to pay for his [Trump’s] actions,” says Taylor, whose sustainable hat company Offcut Caps provided the first pledge of 1,000 trees.
“Obviously it’s a big challenge,” Price says of their goal of planting 10 billion trees. “We are looking to cover an area about the size of Kentucky or the North Island of New Zealand or Iceland,” he explains. “These aren’t huge areas, especially when you break them down by country. Split that between 200 countries around the world, and it’s not too bad.”
Unlike Trump Hotels, Trump Steaks, Trump Water, or the myriad other products with the Trump name on it, neither the president nor his family has a stake in Trump Forest. But the creators of Trump Forest say that they’d love if he found out about it, and they are keen to work out an arrangement should he be interested in endorsing their project.
Stealing the land...
“We are here to stay, forever.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vows to keep settlements.
And Donald Trump seems fine with it.
Updated by Sarah Wildman
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told an audience of Jewish settlers that he has no intention of dismantling Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for peace with the Palestinians.
“We are here to stay, forever,” Netanyahu said Monday night in Barkan, a settlement of about 1,500 people, at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s West Bank presence.
"There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,” he vowed. “We are guarding Samaria against those who want to uproot us."
The key word in that sentence is "Samaria." It’s the biblical term for part of the region most of the international community refers to as the West Bank. It’s also an area of land much of the international community believes to be illegally occupied by Israel.
Netanyahu’s comments run counter to decades of stated US policy calling for some settlements to be evacuated as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. Under previous US administrations, Netanyahu would have been rebuked.
By contrast, a Trump administration spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said only, “It is no secret what each side's position is on this issue.” And that makes sense, because it is Trump’s own comments on the Middle East, and his skepticism about the need for a two-state solution, that may have led Netanyahu to believe he could speak and act with impunity.
The UN, the European Union, the United States, and even other Israeli leaders from across its political spectrum, have long backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That sort of deal would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, something that could only happen if Israel ceded some of the land it has occupied in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War to the Palestinians. Some Israeli settlements would, by definition, need to be uprooted along the way. The Israeli population of the West Bank is estimated to range between 450,000 and 500,000.
But that sort of deal has never been Trump’s priority. And that means Netanyahu doesn’t have to say that it’s his, either.
Trump has mulled dumping the two-state solution for months
Trump came into office signaling he was willing to buck all diplomatic conventional wisdom on Israel, the West Bank, and settlements. His diplomatic envoy to the region, Jason Greenblatt, told Israeli Army radio back in November that “it is certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activities should be condemned and that it is an obstacle for peace, because it is not an obstacle for peace.”
And in February, at a press conference with Netanyahu, Trump himself seemed to question decades of established US diplomatic efforts. “I’m looking at a two state and one state,” he said at the time, “and I like the one that both parties like.”
Both sides widely interpreted the comment as a break from years of American support for a two-state solution.
Last Friday, the State Department doubled down on that ambivalence. “We are not going to state what the outcome has to be,” Heather Nauert, a spokesperson, said, speaking of the administration’s move to restart peace talks by sending Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a team of negotiators to the region.
"It has to be workable to both sides,” Nauert continued. “That’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it.”
For many critics of the administration, a US refusal to “bias” an outcome of peace talks was read as, in fact, biasing the talks — by seeming to endorse Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank.
Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told me today the State Department’s statement “is a deliberate slap in the face of an international consensus on the need for Palestinian self-determination.”
He said Trump “must make clear to Israel that the status quo is unacceptable and that Palestinians should be afforded equal rights, if not a state, and that there is no in between.”
The problem for critics of both the American and Israeli administrations is that there’s no reason to believe that Trump would pressure a close ally like Netanyahu to do something the Israeli leader clearly doesn’t want to do.
Netanyahu has said this before. This time feels different
As the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz pointed out, this isn’t the first time Netanyahu has pledged to keep Israelis on West Bank land. In January 2014 he told Israel journalists, “I have no intention of evacuating any settlement or uprooting any Israeli.” In January 2013 he promised, “The days of bulldozers uprooting Jews are behind us, not ahead of us."
And Ha’aretz noted Tuesday that Netanyahu has recently been taking more speaking engagements in the West Bank and celebrating West Bank products and achievements.
In his speech Monday, he told the crowd that when Israel has uprooted settlements in the past, the country has not gotten peace in return, but instead has been hit by missiles. It was a reference to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the subsequent years of conflict that have followed, including a war in 2014 that led to the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 66 Israeli soldiers.
Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution said that Monday night’s position was largely meant for domestic consumption and a nod to Netanyahu’s right-wing base. But ultimately, he said, it was consistent with the Israeli prime minister’s statements in the past.
“He thinks Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be no different than having Arab cities within Israel,” Sachs said.
Trump appears to agree, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.
And Donald Trump seems fine with it.
Updated by Sarah Wildman
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told an audience of Jewish settlers that he has no intention of dismantling Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for peace with the Palestinians.
“We are here to stay, forever,” Netanyahu said Monday night in Barkan, a settlement of about 1,500 people, at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s West Bank presence.
"There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,” he vowed. “We are guarding Samaria against those who want to uproot us."
The key word in that sentence is "Samaria." It’s the biblical term for part of the region most of the international community refers to as the West Bank. It’s also an area of land much of the international community believes to be illegally occupied by Israel.
Netanyahu’s comments run counter to decades of stated US policy calling for some settlements to be evacuated as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians. Under previous US administrations, Netanyahu would have been rebuked.
By contrast, a Trump administration spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said only, “It is no secret what each side's position is on this issue.” And that makes sense, because it is Trump’s own comments on the Middle East, and his skepticism about the need for a two-state solution, that may have led Netanyahu to believe he could speak and act with impunity.
The UN, the European Union, the United States, and even other Israeli leaders from across its political spectrum, have long backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That sort of deal would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, something that could only happen if Israel ceded some of the land it has occupied in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War to the Palestinians. Some Israeli settlements would, by definition, need to be uprooted along the way. The Israeli population of the West Bank is estimated to range between 450,000 and 500,000.
But that sort of deal has never been Trump’s priority. And that means Netanyahu doesn’t have to say that it’s his, either.
Trump has mulled dumping the two-state solution for months
Trump came into office signaling he was willing to buck all diplomatic conventional wisdom on Israel, the West Bank, and settlements. His diplomatic envoy to the region, Jason Greenblatt, told Israeli Army radio back in November that “it is certainly not Mr. Trump’s view that settlement activities should be condemned and that it is an obstacle for peace, because it is not an obstacle for peace.”
And in February, at a press conference with Netanyahu, Trump himself seemed to question decades of established US diplomatic efforts. “I’m looking at a two state and one state,” he said at the time, “and I like the one that both parties like.”
Both sides widely interpreted the comment as a break from years of American support for a two-state solution.
Last Friday, the State Department doubled down on that ambivalence. “We are not going to state what the outcome has to be,” Heather Nauert, a spokesperson, said, speaking of the administration’s move to restart peace talks by sending Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a team of negotiators to the region.
"It has to be workable to both sides,” Nauert continued. “That’s the best view as to not really bias one side over the other, to make sure that they can work through it.”
For many critics of the administration, a US refusal to “bias” an outcome of peace talks was read as, in fact, biasing the talks — by seeming to endorse Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank.
Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told me today the State Department’s statement “is a deliberate slap in the face of an international consensus on the need for Palestinian self-determination.”
He said Trump “must make clear to Israel that the status quo is unacceptable and that Palestinians should be afforded equal rights, if not a state, and that there is no in between.”
The problem for critics of both the American and Israeli administrations is that there’s no reason to believe that Trump would pressure a close ally like Netanyahu to do something the Israeli leader clearly doesn’t want to do.
Netanyahu has said this before. This time feels different
As the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz pointed out, this isn’t the first time Netanyahu has pledged to keep Israelis on West Bank land. In January 2014 he told Israel journalists, “I have no intention of evacuating any settlement or uprooting any Israeli.” In January 2013 he promised, “The days of bulldozers uprooting Jews are behind us, not ahead of us."
And Ha’aretz noted Tuesday that Netanyahu has recently been taking more speaking engagements in the West Bank and celebrating West Bank products and achievements.
In his speech Monday, he told the crowd that when Israel has uprooted settlements in the past, the country has not gotten peace in return, but instead has been hit by missiles. It was a reference to the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the subsequent years of conflict that have followed, including a war in 2014 that led to the deaths of over 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 66 Israeli soldiers.
Natan Sachs of the Brookings Institution said that Monday night’s position was largely meant for domestic consumption and a nod to Netanyahu’s right-wing base. But ultimately, he said, it was consistent with the Israeli prime minister’s statements in the past.
“He thinks Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be no different than having Arab cities within Israel,” Sachs said.
Trump appears to agree, even if the rest of the world doesn’t.
Paul Ryan wants to fuck you and your children so Rich people get richer...
Paul Ryan’s postcard tax return is really dumb
Cutting millionaires’ taxes is neither necessary nor sufficient to simplify tax filing.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias
As Republicans rally behind a big push for tax cuts, expect to hear one idea over and over: that a major goal of reform is to make the tax code so simple you could file your taxes on a postcard.
Paul Ryan floated this notion — complete with a postcard mock-up — in his 2016 campaign policy document “A Better Way.” And according to Majority Whip Steve Scalise, as quoted by Jeremy Beaman in the Washington Examiner, this is an idea that “gets people excited” about tax reform. That’s a key messaging goal for Republicans because the actual underlying policy objective — reducing the tax rate paid by very rich people and large corporations — isn’t popular, so you need to yoke it to something that is popular, like filing your taxes on a postcard.
As Ryan said in an August 8 speech on taxes to business leaders, “We will consolidate the existing seven brackets into three, double the standard deduction, and simplify things to the point that you can do your taxes on a form the size of a postcard. This, instead of the 1040 form. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
It would be pretty nice. That said, the ideas Ryan is proposing are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve that goal. Republican tax plans feature large, costly changes that have nothing to do with simplifying the process of filling out tax forms. And they also retain features of the existing tax code that require some people to engage in fairly laborious paperwork in order to do their taxes properly — solving the problem by filling their model postcard with hand waving and asterisks.
Fundamentally, greatly simplifying tax compliance for a majority of Americans doesn’t require changing the tax code at all — it simply requires challenging the entrenched lobbying power of the accounting industry and tax prep software vendors.
Paul Ryan’s postcard is more complicated than it seems
The postcard mocked up by the House Ways and Means Committee, the body that writes tax legislation in the lower House, does indeed look pretty simple at first glance:
One is that line 3’s reference to “specified savings plans” is completely punting on the question of what the specified savings plans are.
The other is that in lines 9, 10, and 11, the form achieves simplicity by saying nothing at all about what the relevant credits are or who is eligible to claim them and in what quantity.
To make either of these provisions work, you would, in practice, need to work with some additional forms. The postcard would just be a starting point. The existing IRS tax compliance process essentially arrives at the same conclusion in reverse. For people with simple tax situations that don’t involve claiming these credits or making contributions to special tax-preferred accounts, you already don’t need to fill out Form 1040. Instead you use Form 1040 EZ (it’s easy, get it?) which looks a lot like Ryan’s postcard.
The big reason that 1040 EZ takes up a full page rather than getting down to postcard size is that the IRS made room for boring stuff like your name, address, and Social Security number. They have a place for you to sign your name, and also a place for your accountant to sign her name if she helped you with your taxes. If you’re a married couple filing jointly, they have space for your spouse’s name and signature. The IRS lets you say which bank account you’d like to have your refund deposited in.
It’s possible that rather than using a standard 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, you could fit this extra stuff onto the back side of a postcard. On the other hand, you might prefer to have your personal financial information in a sealed envelope rather than slap it on the outside of a postcard that any mail carrier can read.
Either way, this is a page layout problem and not a tax policy problem. And Republicans’ key tax policy ideas — that rates should be lower and less progressive, and that investment income should receive favorable treatment — play no role in the simplification.
Cutting rates and brackets doesn’t simplify things
Both form 1040 EZ and the Better Way postcard gain themselves a great deal of simplicity by telling people to compute their actual taxes owed by consulting a separately published tax table. That’s where the different rates and brackets are applied to translate a given amount of taxable income into a given amount of taxes that you need to pay. The Better Way doesn’t do away with the need to consult the tax table.
And as long as you are consulting a tax table, the key element of the Better Way plan — consolidating the existing array of tax brackets into only three, leaving high-income tax payers to pay at a much lower rate — is playing no simplification role at all. With the assistance of a handy tax table, you could easily have a system with a dozen — or even two dozen — brackets. The only real limitation is how many lines you can fit on a page.
Indeed, if instead of asking people to check a paper table you had them plug a number into a website or a mobile phone app, you could use calculus to devise a system with an infinite number of infinitesimal tax brackets without meaningfully making the system more complicated. Yet these tax changes are a really big deal. According to the Tax Policy Center, they could reduce federal tax revenue by as much as $7.8 trillion over the span of ten years. If Republicans get as bold as they sometimes say they will about eliminating deductions, that number might get down to “only” $3.5 trillion. Under either scenario, multi-millionaires in the top 0.1 percent of the population are looking at an enormous windfall that will boost their after-tax incomes by 12-20 percent.
Middle class families would get relatively little. And if that multi-trillion dollar revenue hole is actually offset by spending cuts as Republicans say they want to do, middle class families will end up worse off.
Yet if Congress were willing to challenge the entrenched interests of companies like H&R Block and Intuit, it would be possible to achieve much greater simplification than Ryan or Trump is promising without any loss of revenue.
Radical tax simplification is easy
Japan, the United Kingdom, and several other countries have adopted a system known as “precision withholding” that lets taxpayers avoid filing any kind of tax return at all. The tax return, at the end of the day, is an anachronistic legacy of the old days of paper record-keeping when it wouldn’t have been feasible to calculate taxes without outsourcing a huge share of the work to individual families.
These days, in countries that have implemented modern tax systems, the tax agency simply takes exactly the right amount out of every paycheck. If they find that a mistake was made — not accounting for a charitable donation or mortgage interest, for example — they find that mistake in charity and bank records, and they fix it for you. In journalist T.R. Reid’s great new book A Fine Mess, he explains how the Japanese system works:
Japan's equivalent of the IRS, Kokuzeicho, gathers all the pertinent data for each worker — income, taxable benefits, number of personal exemptions, tax withheld, and so on — and then computes how much the worker owes in tax, down to the last yen. Because Japan uses a system known as "precision withholding," with the amount changing whenever pay goes up or down, most people withhold the exact amount due.
In early March, Kokuzeicho sends a postcard to every citizen that sets forth all this information: how much you earned, how much tax you owe, how much tax you've already paid through withholding. If you've paid in more tax than you owe, Kokuzeicho deposits the refund amount in your bank account; if you did not withhold enough, the agency takes the tax that's due from your bank account. …
As a result, paying income tax is a totally automatic process for about 80 percent of Japanese households, requiring no more work than reading a postcard once a year.
Japan’s top income tax bracket is 45 percent, by the way, and it’s levied on incomes of over $350,000 a year. There is absolutely no need to bundle this kind of radical tax simplification with giant tax cuts. It’s easy to file your taxes in Japan because the Japanese government decided to make it a priority.
That’s a choice that American conservatives have fought against, tooth and nail, with the help of predatory tax services companies like H&R Block and Intuit (the makers of TurboTax). When Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Dan Coats (R-IN) introduced a fairly timid, intentionally bipartisan tax reform bill in 2011 and included a proposal for return-free filing, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist blasted it, writing in a letter to the senators that “the clear goal of this measure is to raise taxes in a way that leaves politicians with clean hands.” Norquist wants to make taxes complicated so people hate them, just as Intuit wants them complicated so that people remain dependent on its terrible, unnecessary software.
Back in 2016, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a kind of intermediary step to the Japanese system — sponsoring legislation that would direct the IRS to develop its own in-house tax prep software that would make it free and easy for normal people to file their taxes. Hillary Clinton endorsed her plan, as did Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Tammy Baldwin, and other Senate Democrats. But postcard-touting Republicans haven’t been interested.
Cutting millionaires’ taxes is neither necessary nor sufficient to simplify tax filing.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias
As Republicans rally behind a big push for tax cuts, expect to hear one idea over and over: that a major goal of reform is to make the tax code so simple you could file your taxes on a postcard.
Paul Ryan floated this notion — complete with a postcard mock-up — in his 2016 campaign policy document “A Better Way.” And according to Majority Whip Steve Scalise, as quoted by Jeremy Beaman in the Washington Examiner, this is an idea that “gets people excited” about tax reform. That’s a key messaging goal for Republicans because the actual underlying policy objective — reducing the tax rate paid by very rich people and large corporations — isn’t popular, so you need to yoke it to something that is popular, like filing your taxes on a postcard.
As Ryan said in an August 8 speech on taxes to business leaders, “We will consolidate the existing seven brackets into three, double the standard deduction, and simplify things to the point that you can do your taxes on a form the size of a postcard. This, instead of the 1040 form. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
It would be pretty nice. That said, the ideas Ryan is proposing are neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve that goal. Republican tax plans feature large, costly changes that have nothing to do with simplifying the process of filling out tax forms. And they also retain features of the existing tax code that require some people to engage in fairly laborious paperwork in order to do their taxes properly — solving the problem by filling their model postcard with hand waving and asterisks.
Fundamentally, greatly simplifying tax compliance for a majority of Americans doesn’t require changing the tax code at all — it simply requires challenging the entrenched lobbying power of the accounting industry and tax prep software vendors.
Paul Ryan’s postcard is more complicated than it seems
The postcard mocked up by the House Ways and Means Committee, the body that writes tax legislation in the lower House, does indeed look pretty simple at first glance:
One is that line 3’s reference to “specified savings plans” is completely punting on the question of what the specified savings plans are.
The other is that in lines 9, 10, and 11, the form achieves simplicity by saying nothing at all about what the relevant credits are or who is eligible to claim them and in what quantity.
To make either of these provisions work, you would, in practice, need to work with some additional forms. The postcard would just be a starting point. The existing IRS tax compliance process essentially arrives at the same conclusion in reverse. For people with simple tax situations that don’t involve claiming these credits or making contributions to special tax-preferred accounts, you already don’t need to fill out Form 1040. Instead you use Form 1040 EZ (it’s easy, get it?) which looks a lot like Ryan’s postcard.
The big reason that 1040 EZ takes up a full page rather than getting down to postcard size is that the IRS made room for boring stuff like your name, address, and Social Security number. They have a place for you to sign your name, and also a place for your accountant to sign her name if she helped you with your taxes. If you’re a married couple filing jointly, they have space for your spouse’s name and signature. The IRS lets you say which bank account you’d like to have your refund deposited in.
It’s possible that rather than using a standard 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper, you could fit this extra stuff onto the back side of a postcard. On the other hand, you might prefer to have your personal financial information in a sealed envelope rather than slap it on the outside of a postcard that any mail carrier can read.
Either way, this is a page layout problem and not a tax policy problem. And Republicans’ key tax policy ideas — that rates should be lower and less progressive, and that investment income should receive favorable treatment — play no role in the simplification.
Cutting rates and brackets doesn’t simplify things
Both form 1040 EZ and the Better Way postcard gain themselves a great deal of simplicity by telling people to compute their actual taxes owed by consulting a separately published tax table. That’s where the different rates and brackets are applied to translate a given amount of taxable income into a given amount of taxes that you need to pay. The Better Way doesn’t do away with the need to consult the tax table.
And as long as you are consulting a tax table, the key element of the Better Way plan — consolidating the existing array of tax brackets into only three, leaving high-income tax payers to pay at a much lower rate — is playing no simplification role at all. With the assistance of a handy tax table, you could easily have a system with a dozen — or even two dozen — brackets. The only real limitation is how many lines you can fit on a page.
Indeed, if instead of asking people to check a paper table you had them plug a number into a website or a mobile phone app, you could use calculus to devise a system with an infinite number of infinitesimal tax brackets without meaningfully making the system more complicated. Yet these tax changes are a really big deal. According to the Tax Policy Center, they could reduce federal tax revenue by as much as $7.8 trillion over the span of ten years. If Republicans get as bold as they sometimes say they will about eliminating deductions, that number might get down to “only” $3.5 trillion. Under either scenario, multi-millionaires in the top 0.1 percent of the population are looking at an enormous windfall that will boost their after-tax incomes by 12-20 percent.
Middle class families would get relatively little. And if that multi-trillion dollar revenue hole is actually offset by spending cuts as Republicans say they want to do, middle class families will end up worse off.
Yet if Congress were willing to challenge the entrenched interests of companies like H&R Block and Intuit, it would be possible to achieve much greater simplification than Ryan or Trump is promising without any loss of revenue.
Radical tax simplification is easy
Japan, the United Kingdom, and several other countries have adopted a system known as “precision withholding” that lets taxpayers avoid filing any kind of tax return at all. The tax return, at the end of the day, is an anachronistic legacy of the old days of paper record-keeping when it wouldn’t have been feasible to calculate taxes without outsourcing a huge share of the work to individual families.
These days, in countries that have implemented modern tax systems, the tax agency simply takes exactly the right amount out of every paycheck. If they find that a mistake was made — not accounting for a charitable donation or mortgage interest, for example — they find that mistake in charity and bank records, and they fix it for you. In journalist T.R. Reid’s great new book A Fine Mess, he explains how the Japanese system works:
Japan's equivalent of the IRS, Kokuzeicho, gathers all the pertinent data for each worker — income, taxable benefits, number of personal exemptions, tax withheld, and so on — and then computes how much the worker owes in tax, down to the last yen. Because Japan uses a system known as "precision withholding," with the amount changing whenever pay goes up or down, most people withhold the exact amount due.
In early March, Kokuzeicho sends a postcard to every citizen that sets forth all this information: how much you earned, how much tax you owe, how much tax you've already paid through withholding. If you've paid in more tax than you owe, Kokuzeicho deposits the refund amount in your bank account; if you did not withhold enough, the agency takes the tax that's due from your bank account. …
As a result, paying income tax is a totally automatic process for about 80 percent of Japanese households, requiring no more work than reading a postcard once a year.
Japan’s top income tax bracket is 45 percent, by the way, and it’s levied on incomes of over $350,000 a year. There is absolutely no need to bundle this kind of radical tax simplification with giant tax cuts. It’s easy to file your taxes in Japan because the Japanese government decided to make it a priority.
That’s a choice that American conservatives have fought against, tooth and nail, with the help of predatory tax services companies like H&R Block and Intuit (the makers of TurboTax). When Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Dan Coats (R-IN) introduced a fairly timid, intentionally bipartisan tax reform bill in 2011 and included a proposal for return-free filing, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist blasted it, writing in a letter to the senators that “the clear goal of this measure is to raise taxes in a way that leaves politicians with clean hands.” Norquist wants to make taxes complicated so people hate them, just as Intuit wants them complicated so that people remain dependent on its terrible, unnecessary software.
Back in 2016, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a kind of intermediary step to the Japanese system — sponsoring legislation that would direct the IRS to develop its own in-house tax prep software that would make it free and easy for normal people to file their taxes. Hillary Clinton endorsed her plan, as did Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Tammy Baldwin, and other Senate Democrats. But postcard-touting Republicans haven’t been interested.
Russia investigation, can’t pardon his way out...
10 legal experts on why Trump can’t pardon his way out of the Russia investigation
“It may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.”
Updated by Sean Illing
Last Friday, President Trump pardoned former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio was convicted in July of criminal contempt after ignoring a court order to cease his signature immigration roundups but hadn’t yet been sentenced. Trump ignored the court’s judgment and ended the case without any formal Justice Department review.
To some, Trump’s decision is a sign that he’s preparing — or at least willing — to pardon people associated with the growing investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Robert Bauer, a law professor at New York University and former White House counsel to President Obama, argued in the Washington Post that the pardon may be a “test run for shutting down the Russia investigation.”
I reached out to 10 legal experts and asked them if the Arpaio decision is a signal of how Trump might seek to undercut the Russia investigation. I also asked what it would mean for the investigation if Trump pardoned key players in the scandal like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, or Jared Kushner before any of them could be convicted.
While it’s impossible to predict what Trump will do, nearly all the experts I spoke to agree on one thing: If Trump does use his pardoning powers to thwart the Russia investigation, it’s very likely to backfire.
If someone like Flynn or Kushner were preemptively pardoned, he wouldn’t be able to plead the Fifth Amendment if he were called to testify against Trump. The Fifth Amendment protects citizens against self-incrimination. But if someone has been pardoned, they no longer face the threat of prosecution, and so they can’t use a desire to avoid incriminating themselves as an excuse not to answer a question.
So in addition to potentially obstructing justice, Trump would only leave himself — and his colleagues — more vulnerable if he decided to pardon anyone currently under investigation. Of course, that doesn’t mean he won’t pull the trigger anyway. But he might want to think long and hard about the implications before he does.
There is, however, one scenario in which Trump could save himself and others from potential prosecution. It’s what Susan Bloch, a law professor at Georgetown, calls the Nixon scenario: “Trump pardons them [Flynn, Kushner, Manafort, and Donald Trump Jr.] as he is exiting the White House and Trump exits early, allowing Pence to become president, and Pence then pardons Trump. Trump will then have successfully shielded himself and his colleagues from criminal liability.”
Their full responses, edited for clarity and style, are below.
Lisa Kern Griffin, law professor, Duke University
President Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Arpaio serves not only as a political signal but also as a legal strategy. Potential witnesses in Robert Mueller’s investigation now know that if they refuse to testify, they need not fear contempt citations. And if they lie to protect President Trump, he stands ready to pardon them for both their underlying offenses and their obstruction of judicial or congressional processes.
When it comes to family and staff implicated in the Russia investigation, timing will be everything, and pardons may come late in the process. President Trump appears likely to cling to the White House for as long as he profits personally from his presidency. When he must finally relinquish the office, he will no doubt make aggressive use of the pardon power on the way out.
Julie O’Sullivan, law professor, Georgetown University
If the President pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done. If the president were to pardon Kushner or Manafort or Flynn, presumably that pardon would extend to the Russia investigation because that is what concerns Trump. If — and this is a big if — the president is shown to have pardoned them to avoid his own personal exposure in the Russia investigation, that in and of itself could constitute obstruction of justice.
Mark Tushnet, law professor, Harvard University
It's generally thought that accepting a pardon constitutes an admission of guilt with respect to the offense for which the person was convicted. That prevents the government from prosecuting the person for that offense. But it doesn't operate as a general grant of immunity for other offenses, so the person who is pardoned still can assert his or her right against self-incrimination with respect to those offenses.
The case of a "preemptive" pardon — that is, one issued before conviction — is different. The scope of the person's Fifth Amendment rights would depend on the scope of the pardon — if for only specific offenses, the person would retain Fifth Amendment rights for other offenses. Basically, even after a pardon, people who Mueller wants testimony from will still be negotiating for immunity grants.
Asha Rangappa, associate dean, Yale Law School
If President Trump pardons subjects of Mueller's investigation, they will be unable to claim their Fifth Amendment rights if they are asked to testify under oath. In theory, this would then facilitate Mueller's investigation, as these individuals would have to tell Mueller everything they know.
Of course, this presumes that the subjects of any such pardon would tell the truth if compelled to testify under oath. Normally, the threat of being prosecuted for perjury — which would be a wholly separate crime — is what would ensure their truthfulness. What Trump's pardon of Arpaio reveals, however, is that he is not above subverting the judicial process to reward those who stay loyal to him.
Joshua Dressler, law professor, Ohio State University
If President Trump pardons someone involved in the Russian investigation, it may depend when he pardons that person. If he awaits an indictment and pardons in advance only for the particular offenses named in the indictment, that individual might still assert his Fifth Amendment privilege on other not-yet-pardoned offenses.
However, if the president provides a pardon similar to that provided by President Ford to Nixon, in which Nixon was pardoned for "all offenses he may have committed between the dates xxx-xxx," then that person would not have a lawful basis to assert the Fifth Amendment. He has been freed of all risks.
If President Trump provides a full Nixon-type pardon, and if the person pardoned still refuses to testify, that person could be held in contempt and jailed until he agrees to testify. But the president might pardon that as well.
Paul Butler, law professor, Georgetown University
Being pardoned is not an admission of guilt. President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon prospectively, before he had even been charged with a crime. A pardon is the president's to bestow, and does not depend on whether the person pardoned accepts it or rejects it — it's a presidential order to prosecutors and judges, rather than to the subject of the pardon.
A pardon is different from a blanket grant of immunity, however, so a person pardoned by the president might still claim the Fifth Amendment privilege in testifying about the subject of the pardon — for example, there might be a legitimate concern about a state prosecution for the same conduct.
Christopher Slobogin, law professor, Vanderbilt University
Under the Constitution, the president can pardon someone for a crime before legal proceedings have begun, which means before it’s known for sure whether a crime has been committed. Thus Trump could pardon everyone involved in the Russia probe by declaring that they are pardoned “for all federal offenses committed in connection with communicating with Russian officials during the 2016 election campaign.”
The only limitation is that the president cannot pardon for offenses against state, as opposed to federal, law (so if Arizona wants to go after Sheriff Arpaio, it can despite the pardon). If Congress doesn’t like the president’s use of the pardon, its only legal remedy is impeachment, although it could also hold hearings to embarrass him.
Peter Shane, law professor, Ohio State University
Russiagate pardons would pose some strategic risks for Trump. No one pardoned could constitutionally withhold their testimony in either a criminal investigation or from Congress. And, unlike the pardon of Arpaio, which is a despicable blow to the rule of law, pardoning anyone who might have been a co-conspirator in misconduct involving Trump himself would much more plausibly be impeachable.
And in any event, there is no "ground to prepare." Pardoning Manafort, Flynn, Kushner, or anyone surnamed Trump would unleash a firestorm of protest that the Arpaio pardon will not lessen in any way. In Marbury v. Madison, John Marshall said there were "political" acts for which the president "is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience." While Trump's "conscience" has yet to display itself, both Congress and the voters can hold him to account "in his political character."
Ric Simmons, law professor, Ohio State University
it is unclear whether a defendant who accepts a pardon is somehow admitting guilt. There is a 1915 Supreme Court case which states that accepting a pardon carries an admission of guilt (Burdick v. United States), but often pardons have been granted because the president states he believes the defendant was actually innocent, and some federal statutes expressly contemplate the fact that a person who is pardoned may be legally innocent. At best, the legal rules on this are unclear.
So even though Flynn or Manafort or Kushner would not necessarily be admitting guilt if they accepted a pardon, their pardon would mean that it would be much easier to get them to testify about their actions.
“It may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.”
Updated by Sean Illing
Last Friday, President Trump pardoned former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio was convicted in July of criminal contempt after ignoring a court order to cease his signature immigration roundups but hadn’t yet been sentenced. Trump ignored the court’s judgment and ended the case without any formal Justice Department review.
To some, Trump’s decision is a sign that he’s preparing — or at least willing — to pardon people associated with the growing investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Robert Bauer, a law professor at New York University and former White House counsel to President Obama, argued in the Washington Post that the pardon may be a “test run for shutting down the Russia investigation.”
I reached out to 10 legal experts and asked them if the Arpaio decision is a signal of how Trump might seek to undercut the Russia investigation. I also asked what it would mean for the investigation if Trump pardoned key players in the scandal like Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, or Jared Kushner before any of them could be convicted.
While it’s impossible to predict what Trump will do, nearly all the experts I spoke to agree on one thing: If Trump does use his pardoning powers to thwart the Russia investigation, it’s very likely to backfire.
If someone like Flynn or Kushner were preemptively pardoned, he wouldn’t be able to plead the Fifth Amendment if he were called to testify against Trump. The Fifth Amendment protects citizens against self-incrimination. But if someone has been pardoned, they no longer face the threat of prosecution, and so they can’t use a desire to avoid incriminating themselves as an excuse not to answer a question.
So in addition to potentially obstructing justice, Trump would only leave himself — and his colleagues — more vulnerable if he decided to pardon anyone currently under investigation. Of course, that doesn’t mean he won’t pull the trigger anyway. But he might want to think long and hard about the implications before he does.
There is, however, one scenario in which Trump could save himself and others from potential prosecution. It’s what Susan Bloch, a law professor at Georgetown, calls the Nixon scenario: “Trump pardons them [Flynn, Kushner, Manafort, and Donald Trump Jr.] as he is exiting the White House and Trump exits early, allowing Pence to become president, and Pence then pardons Trump. Trump will then have successfully shielded himself and his colleagues from criminal liability.”
Their full responses, edited for clarity and style, are below.
Lisa Kern Griffin, law professor, Duke University
President Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Arpaio serves not only as a political signal but also as a legal strategy. Potential witnesses in Robert Mueller’s investigation now know that if they refuse to testify, they need not fear contempt citations. And if they lie to protect President Trump, he stands ready to pardon them for both their underlying offenses and their obstruction of judicial or congressional processes.
When it comes to family and staff implicated in the Russia investigation, timing will be everything, and pardons may come late in the process. President Trump appears likely to cling to the White House for as long as he profits personally from his presidency. When he must finally relinquish the office, he will no doubt make aggressive use of the pardon power on the way out.
Julie O’Sullivan, law professor, Georgetown University
If the President pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done. If the president were to pardon Kushner or Manafort or Flynn, presumably that pardon would extend to the Russia investigation because that is what concerns Trump. If — and this is a big if — the president is shown to have pardoned them to avoid his own personal exposure in the Russia investigation, that in and of itself could constitute obstruction of justice.
Mark Tushnet, law professor, Harvard University
It's generally thought that accepting a pardon constitutes an admission of guilt with respect to the offense for which the person was convicted. That prevents the government from prosecuting the person for that offense. But it doesn't operate as a general grant of immunity for other offenses, so the person who is pardoned still can assert his or her right against self-incrimination with respect to those offenses.
The case of a "preemptive" pardon — that is, one issued before conviction — is different. The scope of the person's Fifth Amendment rights would depend on the scope of the pardon — if for only specific offenses, the person would retain Fifth Amendment rights for other offenses. Basically, even after a pardon, people who Mueller wants testimony from will still be negotiating for immunity grants.
Asha Rangappa, associate dean, Yale Law School
If President Trump pardons subjects of Mueller's investigation, they will be unable to claim their Fifth Amendment rights if they are asked to testify under oath. In theory, this would then facilitate Mueller's investigation, as these individuals would have to tell Mueller everything they know.
Of course, this presumes that the subjects of any such pardon would tell the truth if compelled to testify under oath. Normally, the threat of being prosecuted for perjury — which would be a wholly separate crime — is what would ensure their truthfulness. What Trump's pardon of Arpaio reveals, however, is that he is not above subverting the judicial process to reward those who stay loyal to him.
Joshua Dressler, law professor, Ohio State University
If President Trump pardons someone involved in the Russian investigation, it may depend when he pardons that person. If he awaits an indictment and pardons in advance only for the particular offenses named in the indictment, that individual might still assert his Fifth Amendment privilege on other not-yet-pardoned offenses.
However, if the president provides a pardon similar to that provided by President Ford to Nixon, in which Nixon was pardoned for "all offenses he may have committed between the dates xxx-xxx," then that person would not have a lawful basis to assert the Fifth Amendment. He has been freed of all risks.
If President Trump provides a full Nixon-type pardon, and if the person pardoned still refuses to testify, that person could be held in contempt and jailed until he agrees to testify. But the president might pardon that as well.
Paul Butler, law professor, Georgetown University
Being pardoned is not an admission of guilt. President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon prospectively, before he had even been charged with a crime. A pardon is the president's to bestow, and does not depend on whether the person pardoned accepts it or rejects it — it's a presidential order to prosecutors and judges, rather than to the subject of the pardon.
A pardon is different from a blanket grant of immunity, however, so a person pardoned by the president might still claim the Fifth Amendment privilege in testifying about the subject of the pardon — for example, there might be a legitimate concern about a state prosecution for the same conduct.
Christopher Slobogin, law professor, Vanderbilt University
Under the Constitution, the president can pardon someone for a crime before legal proceedings have begun, which means before it’s known for sure whether a crime has been committed. Thus Trump could pardon everyone involved in the Russia probe by declaring that they are pardoned “for all federal offenses committed in connection with communicating with Russian officials during the 2016 election campaign.”
The only limitation is that the president cannot pardon for offenses against state, as opposed to federal, law (so if Arizona wants to go after Sheriff Arpaio, it can despite the pardon). If Congress doesn’t like the president’s use of the pardon, its only legal remedy is impeachment, although it could also hold hearings to embarrass him.
Peter Shane, law professor, Ohio State University
Russiagate pardons would pose some strategic risks for Trump. No one pardoned could constitutionally withhold their testimony in either a criminal investigation or from Congress. And, unlike the pardon of Arpaio, which is a despicable blow to the rule of law, pardoning anyone who might have been a co-conspirator in misconduct involving Trump himself would much more plausibly be impeachable.
And in any event, there is no "ground to prepare." Pardoning Manafort, Flynn, Kushner, or anyone surnamed Trump would unleash a firestorm of protest that the Arpaio pardon will not lessen in any way. In Marbury v. Madison, John Marshall said there were "political" acts for which the president "is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience." While Trump's "conscience" has yet to display itself, both Congress and the voters can hold him to account "in his political character."
Ric Simmons, law professor, Ohio State University
it is unclear whether a defendant who accepts a pardon is somehow admitting guilt. There is a 1915 Supreme Court case which states that accepting a pardon carries an admission of guilt (Burdick v. United States), but often pardons have been granted because the president states he believes the defendant was actually innocent, and some federal statutes expressly contemplate the fact that a person who is pardoned may be legally innocent. At best, the legal rules on this are unclear.
So even though Flynn or Manafort or Kushner would not necessarily be admitting guilt if they accepted a pardon, their pardon would mean that it would be much easier to get them to testify about their actions.
Huge. HUGE! Taxpayer rip off coming...
How to Make Easy Money — Off Taxpayers
Who will benefit the most from Wisconsin’s huge new pending Foxconn subsidy deal? Meet billionaire Terry Gou.
BY SAM PIZZIGATI
The Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou every once in a while likes to think “outside the box.” Back in 2010, for instance, the giant electronics manufacturer that Gou runs — Foxconn — was facing what corporate flacks like to call a major “PR problem.” Working conditions inside Foxconn’s massive Chinese factories had become so incredibly stressful that workers were committing suicide in shockingly large numbers. They were leaping out factory windows to their deaths.
And what did Gou’s Foxconn do to try to calm the worldwide outrage? The conventional corporate move would have been to dial back the pressure on workers. Foxconn’s move under Gou? The company stretched safety nets in those places where workers would be most likely to leap.
Keeping the pressure on workers — no matter the consequences — has helped Foxconn’s Gou accumulate a personal fortune somewhere north of $6 billion. But Gou has also perfected another sure-fire strategy for piling up the big bucks. He gets taxpayers to give him money. Lots of it.
Gou has cut a wide assortment of subsidy deals over the years, with politicians from Indonesia to Pennsylvania. The deals all follow the same pattern. Foxconn promises to build “job-creating” factories. The political jurisdictions involved hand Foxconn lucrative “incentives” to do the building.
State lawmakers in Wisconsin have now just taken the first step toward approving Foxconn’s biggest subsidy deal yet. The state Assembly has given the green light to what appears to be the biggest subsidy ever handed out to a foreign firm by a US political entity.
Wisconsin taxpayers will, if this deal gains expected state Senate approval, hand Foxconn $1.35 billion for building a factory complex that will employ 3,000 workers. The total package of “incentives” for Foxconn could hit $3 billion — with $2.85 billion of that in taxpayer cash and another $150 million in various tax breaks — if Foxconn’s operation in Wisconsin ends up employing 13,000 workers.
How much per job would Wisconsin be shelling out? One likely scenario: about $500,000 per job. The worst-case scenario: as much as $1 million per job. And neither number here takes into account the Foxconn deal’s eventual environmental cost. Foxconn will be receiving, besides the taxpayer cash, an exemption from regulations that protect Wisconsin’s wetlands.
So Foxconn gets mountains of cash and a free pass to pollute. What do the people of Wisconsin get? One of the largest “economic development” projects the United States has ever seen, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker crowed last month at a White House ceremony announcing the deal with Foxconn’s Terry Gou and President Donald Trump.
This “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” adds an aide to Walker, will bring thousands of “family-supporting jobs.” The new positions, business boosters for the Foxconn deal trumpet, will pay an average $53,000 per year.
But that $53,000 figure only applies to the first 3,000 jobs Foxconn is promising to create and averages highly paid managerial positions in with job slots for assembly-line workers. Actual workers at the new Foxconn complex will likely take home much less than $53,000.
How much less? Community groups skeptical about Foxconn want any deal with the company to include a wage floor. They’re seeking stipulations that guarantee workers at least $15 an hour. The Republican statehouse majority in Wisconsin has so far quashed every attempt to set a decent wage minimum.
You can’t support much of a family, critics of the Foxconn deal are contending, on less than $15 an hour. And you can’t spur economic development that creates good jobs, add watchdogs opposed to the Foxconn deal, by handing corporations giant giveaways.
Throwing money at businesses, as former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser notes, has been a “bad idea” ever since cities started “offering bonuses and pecuniary inducements to manufacturers” in the late 19th century.
These inducements have ratcheted up considerably over recent years, even before taking the new Foxconn deal into account. Between 1990 and 2015, a new Upjohn Institute , average “incentive” packages for businesses tripled in value.
The results of this vast upsurge in subsidies? The US political jurisdictions that did all this subsidizing, the Upjohn researchers found, would have experienced the same economic results without the incentives, observes former mayor Funkhouser, “94 percent of the time.”
What does spur the economic development that creates good jobs? The city of Richmond in Virginia is moving in one hopeful direction. Richmond has begun an Office of Community Wealth Building that aims to enrich local residents instead of billionaire CEOs. The city is focusing on everything from improving regional transportation systems to fostering locally based social enterprises. The Democracy Collaborative, a national organization, has fashioned a network of localities involved in similar “community wealth building” all across the United States.
These operations could certainly use some encouragement from the federal level. But President Trump has proposed a budget, notes Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, that eliminates “successful federal programs that benefit small-and medium-sized manufacturers.” The contradictions between Trump’s budget cuts for these programs and his White House cheerleading for the enormous Foxconn subsidy deal, adds LeRoy, “boggle the mind.”
Foxconn’s Terry Gou would likely see none of these contradictions. That the few should benefit at the expense of the many makes perfect sense to him, as the billionaire makes plain in one of the Gou quotation posters Foxconn has plastered on the walls of its Chinese factories.
“Growth,” proclaims this particular Gou quotation poster, “thy name is suffering.”
Who will benefit the most from Wisconsin’s huge new pending Foxconn subsidy deal? Meet billionaire Terry Gou.
BY SAM PIZZIGATI
The Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou every once in a while likes to think “outside the box.” Back in 2010, for instance, the giant electronics manufacturer that Gou runs — Foxconn — was facing what corporate flacks like to call a major “PR problem.” Working conditions inside Foxconn’s massive Chinese factories had become so incredibly stressful that workers were committing suicide in shockingly large numbers. They were leaping out factory windows to their deaths.
And what did Gou’s Foxconn do to try to calm the worldwide outrage? The conventional corporate move would have been to dial back the pressure on workers. Foxconn’s move under Gou? The company stretched safety nets in those places where workers would be most likely to leap.
Keeping the pressure on workers — no matter the consequences — has helped Foxconn’s Gou accumulate a personal fortune somewhere north of $6 billion. But Gou has also perfected another sure-fire strategy for piling up the big bucks. He gets taxpayers to give him money. Lots of it.
Gou has cut a wide assortment of subsidy deals over the years, with politicians from Indonesia to Pennsylvania. The deals all follow the same pattern. Foxconn promises to build “job-creating” factories. The political jurisdictions involved hand Foxconn lucrative “incentives” to do the building.
State lawmakers in Wisconsin have now just taken the first step toward approving Foxconn’s biggest subsidy deal yet. The state Assembly has given the green light to what appears to be the biggest subsidy ever handed out to a foreign firm by a US political entity.
Wisconsin taxpayers will, if this deal gains expected state Senate approval, hand Foxconn $1.35 billion for building a factory complex that will employ 3,000 workers. The total package of “incentives” for Foxconn could hit $3 billion — with $2.85 billion of that in taxpayer cash and another $150 million in various tax breaks — if Foxconn’s operation in Wisconsin ends up employing 13,000 workers.
How much per job would Wisconsin be shelling out? One likely scenario: about $500,000 per job. The worst-case scenario: as much as $1 million per job. And neither number here takes into account the Foxconn deal’s eventual environmental cost. Foxconn will be receiving, besides the taxpayer cash, an exemption from regulations that protect Wisconsin’s wetlands.
So Foxconn gets mountains of cash and a free pass to pollute. What do the people of Wisconsin get? One of the largest “economic development” projects the United States has ever seen, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker crowed last month at a White House ceremony announcing the deal with Foxconn’s Terry Gou and President Donald Trump.
This “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” adds an aide to Walker, will bring thousands of “family-supporting jobs.” The new positions, business boosters for the Foxconn deal trumpet, will pay an average $53,000 per year.
But that $53,000 figure only applies to the first 3,000 jobs Foxconn is promising to create and averages highly paid managerial positions in with job slots for assembly-line workers. Actual workers at the new Foxconn complex will likely take home much less than $53,000.
How much less? Community groups skeptical about Foxconn want any deal with the company to include a wage floor. They’re seeking stipulations that guarantee workers at least $15 an hour. The Republican statehouse majority in Wisconsin has so far quashed every attempt to set a decent wage minimum.
You can’t support much of a family, critics of the Foxconn deal are contending, on less than $15 an hour. And you can’t spur economic development that creates good jobs, add watchdogs opposed to the Foxconn deal, by handing corporations giant giveaways.
Throwing money at businesses, as former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser notes, has been a “bad idea” ever since cities started “offering bonuses and pecuniary inducements to manufacturers” in the late 19th century.
These inducements have ratcheted up considerably over recent years, even before taking the new Foxconn deal into account. Between 1990 and 2015, a new Upjohn Institute , average “incentive” packages for businesses tripled in value.
The results of this vast upsurge in subsidies? The US political jurisdictions that did all this subsidizing, the Upjohn researchers found, would have experienced the same economic results without the incentives, observes former mayor Funkhouser, “94 percent of the time.”
What does spur the economic development that creates good jobs? The city of Richmond in Virginia is moving in one hopeful direction. Richmond has begun an Office of Community Wealth Building that aims to enrich local residents instead of billionaire CEOs. The city is focusing on everything from improving regional transportation systems to fostering locally based social enterprises. The Democracy Collaborative, a national organization, has fashioned a network of localities involved in similar “community wealth building” all across the United States.
These operations could certainly use some encouragement from the federal level. But President Trump has proposed a budget, notes Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, that eliminates “successful federal programs that benefit small-and medium-sized manufacturers.” The contradictions between Trump’s budget cuts for these programs and his White House cheerleading for the enormous Foxconn subsidy deal, adds LeRoy, “boggle the mind.”
Foxconn’s Terry Gou would likely see none of these contradictions. That the few should benefit at the expense of the many makes perfect sense to him, as the billionaire makes plain in one of the Gou quotation posters Foxconn has plastered on the walls of its Chinese factories.
“Growth,” proclaims this particular Gou quotation poster, “thy name is suffering.”
Civil Forfeiture...
Jeff Sessions Is Bringing Back Civil Forfeiture with a Bang
Here's how the police can take your assets even if you haven't been convicted of a crime.
From billmoyers.com.
In mid-July Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy rollback that’s getting criticism from both sides of the aisle, and the center, too. As The Washington Post notes undoing this Obama-administration policy is a big deal — and means big money.
Known as “adoptive forfeiture,” the program — which gives police departments greater leeway to seize property of those suspected of a crime, even if they’re never charged with or convicted of one — was a significant source of revenue for local law enforcement. In the 12 months before Attorney General Eric Holder shut down the program in 2015, state and local authorities took in $65 million that they shared with federal agencies, according to an analysis of federal data by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that represents forfeiture defendants.
President Trump even mentioned the process in a now somewhat infamous exchange with Texas law enforcement officials when he vowed to “destroy” a state lawmaker that stood in the way of asset seizures.
Civil asset forfeiture has become increasingly controversial, especially because of the extremely limited chance to appeal the proceedings. And then there’s the fact that you don’t have to be convicted of a crime to be subject to civil forfeiture — it’s the property that is at issue. The Institute for Justice found in a 2015 report that between 1997 and 2013, 87 percent of the Department of Justice’s forfeitures did not require any criminal charge or conviction.
Jeff Sessions has a vehement defense of the program:
Civil asset forfeiture is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains, and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels. Even more importantly, it helps return property to the victims of crime. Civil asset forfeiture takes the material support of the criminals and instead makes it the material support of law enforcement, funding priorities like new vehicles, bulletproof vests, opioid overdose reversal kits and better training. In departments across this country, funds that were once used to take lives are now being used to save lives.
BillMoyers.com wanted to find out more about the blurry world of civil forfeiture so we talked with Sarah Stillman, a New Yorker writer and director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the author of “Can the President ‘Destroy’ Criminal-Justice Reformers?” — the result of a yearlong investigation into the controversial process.
Stillman told us that Sessions statement is misleading:
What stood out to me when Sessions made his comments is that one of the things he underscored is that he sees it as totally reasonable in that we’re going after bad guys. He went on to say you can tell that because four out of five people don’t challenge the forfeiture. Of course, he doesn’t mention that it costs money to do that and that is also a big causal factor as to why people don’t challenge it.
In fact, people who have been subject to civil forfeiture are not entitled to a lawyer. Many times, paying a lawyer would cost more than the property may be worth. And, there are only a handful of pro bono law clinics, like The Institute for Justice, that are taking on these cases.
In part Stillman says getting rid of civil forfeiture is just plain common sense among the American populace. A survey by the HuffPost and YouGov found that 71 percent of those surveyed hadn’t even heard of the term. A meagre seven percent supported the practice.
Indeed, Stillman says:
There’s a really easy solution to that which is just make all forfeiture criminal. That to me is the intuitive part of this. The idea that if you commit a crime, and you’re profiting off of that crime, and you’re proven to have done so, then the goods that you’ve got can be taken away from you. I think most citizens would get that concept and be able to stand behind it. I think what people don’t comprehend is the distinction between criminal forfeiture, the process I just described, and civil forfeiture where nothing really has to be proven against you.
Sessions is bucking a nationwide trend by putting so much emphasis on civil forfeiture. According to Stillman: “One of the things that really stands out to me about forfeiture is that it’s so rare to have a bipartisan issue where you’ve got so many voices on the right and so many voices on the left both saying the same thing.” Some conservative think tanks like Cato and the American Enterprise Institute are against the practice.
Stillman notes that the practice of civil forfeiture varies widely by both state and locality. Due in part to the curtailing of municipal and local police budgets, forces have come to rely on it as a way to add to dwindling coffers. Yet, over 20 states have recently passed laws that limit civil forfeiture. (Read the Institute for Justice’s report: “Policing for Profit” for a current list.) Many of those reforms are to change the way the monies are disbursed — so that the flow of money doesn’t come directly back into the department’s pocket.
Sessions is in favor of “equitable sharing,” which Stillman says just lets state and local law enforcement agencies use a loophole by first turning money over to the feds who then give it right back. But, she says, there is a layer of hope in that most of the decisions about criminal justice matters are made at the state and local level — and the tide doesn’t seem to be turning back in Sessions’ direction.
Here's how the police can take your assets even if you haven't been convicted of a crime.
From billmoyers.com.
In mid-July Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a policy rollback that’s getting criticism from both sides of the aisle, and the center, too. As The Washington Post notes undoing this Obama-administration policy is a big deal — and means big money.
Known as “adoptive forfeiture,” the program — which gives police departments greater leeway to seize property of those suspected of a crime, even if they’re never charged with or convicted of one — was a significant source of revenue for local law enforcement. In the 12 months before Attorney General Eric Holder shut down the program in 2015, state and local authorities took in $65 million that they shared with federal agencies, according to an analysis of federal data by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that represents forfeiture defendants.
President Trump even mentioned the process in a now somewhat infamous exchange with Texas law enforcement officials when he vowed to “destroy” a state lawmaker that stood in the way of asset seizures.
Civil asset forfeiture has become increasingly controversial, especially because of the extremely limited chance to appeal the proceedings. And then there’s the fact that you don’t have to be convicted of a crime to be subject to civil forfeiture — it’s the property that is at issue. The Institute for Justice found in a 2015 report that between 1997 and 2013, 87 percent of the Department of Justice’s forfeitures did not require any criminal charge or conviction.
Jeff Sessions has a vehement defense of the program:
Civil asset forfeiture is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains, and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels. Even more importantly, it helps return property to the victims of crime. Civil asset forfeiture takes the material support of the criminals and instead makes it the material support of law enforcement, funding priorities like new vehicles, bulletproof vests, opioid overdose reversal kits and better training. In departments across this country, funds that were once used to take lives are now being used to save lives.
BillMoyers.com wanted to find out more about the blurry world of civil forfeiture so we talked with Sarah Stillman, a New Yorker writer and director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the author of “Can the President ‘Destroy’ Criminal-Justice Reformers?” — the result of a yearlong investigation into the controversial process.
Stillman told us that Sessions statement is misleading:
What stood out to me when Sessions made his comments is that one of the things he underscored is that he sees it as totally reasonable in that we’re going after bad guys. He went on to say you can tell that because four out of five people don’t challenge the forfeiture. Of course, he doesn’t mention that it costs money to do that and that is also a big causal factor as to why people don’t challenge it.
In fact, people who have been subject to civil forfeiture are not entitled to a lawyer. Many times, paying a lawyer would cost more than the property may be worth. And, there are only a handful of pro bono law clinics, like The Institute for Justice, that are taking on these cases.
In part Stillman says getting rid of civil forfeiture is just plain common sense among the American populace. A survey by the HuffPost and YouGov found that 71 percent of those surveyed hadn’t even heard of the term. A meagre seven percent supported the practice.
Indeed, Stillman says:
There’s a really easy solution to that which is just make all forfeiture criminal. That to me is the intuitive part of this. The idea that if you commit a crime, and you’re profiting off of that crime, and you’re proven to have done so, then the goods that you’ve got can be taken away from you. I think most citizens would get that concept and be able to stand behind it. I think what people don’t comprehend is the distinction between criminal forfeiture, the process I just described, and civil forfeiture where nothing really has to be proven against you.
Sessions is bucking a nationwide trend by putting so much emphasis on civil forfeiture. According to Stillman: “One of the things that really stands out to me about forfeiture is that it’s so rare to have a bipartisan issue where you’ve got so many voices on the right and so many voices on the left both saying the same thing.” Some conservative think tanks like Cato and the American Enterprise Institute are against the practice.
Stillman notes that the practice of civil forfeiture varies widely by both state and locality. Due in part to the curtailing of municipal and local police budgets, forces have come to rely on it as a way to add to dwindling coffers. Yet, over 20 states have recently passed laws that limit civil forfeiture. (Read the Institute for Justice’s report: “Policing for Profit” for a current list.) Many of those reforms are to change the way the monies are disbursed — so that the flow of money doesn’t come directly back into the department’s pocket.
Sessions is in favor of “equitable sharing,” which Stillman says just lets state and local law enforcement agencies use a loophole by first turning money over to the feds who then give it right back. But, she says, there is a layer of hope in that most of the decisions about criminal justice matters are made at the state and local level — and the tide doesn’t seem to be turning back in Sessions’ direction.
Coward...
Trump Hides Behind the Storm
As Hurricane Harvey raged, the president tried to use the disaster as cover. It may have worked.
BY MICHAEL WINSHIP
On 9/11, as the World Trade Center collapsed and the Pentagon was in flames, Jo Moore, an adviser to one of British prime minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet members, sent a short email to her boss’ press office: “It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors expenses?”
This stunningly crass and cynical move — she was suggesting the use of a global tragedy to divert media attention from a minor story about pensions for local officials — ultimately forced Moore’s resignation.
But it comes from a long tradition of politicians and public officials trying to hide news behind other events or releasing it at inconvenient times when you hope few people will notice.
(In the days before he became president, John F. Kennedy, aware that many would object to the naming of his brother as attorney general, joked, “I think I’ll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2 a.m., look up and down the street, and if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’”)
Friday nights at the start of the weekend have become Washington’s golden hour for dumping bad news. Donald Trump’s White House already was using this timeless trick barely days after the Bible on which he was sworn in had a chance to cool off.
You’ll recall that he tried to rush his immigration ban executive order over the goal line on Friday, Jan. 27, hoping the crowd and the refs would have their collective backs turned away from the line of scrimmage. No such luck — on Saturday night, angry demonstrators thronged the airports and a federal judge quickly blocked Trump’s decree.
Even though the constant bombardment of the 24/7 news cycle may have diminished its effectiveness, the ploy has been hauled out several times since, including the Friday night they released the financial disclosure forms of some 180 presidential staffers, which revealed that in combination they were worth billions. So much for The People’s President.
But the latest news dump was the most brazen, a triple whammy, for not only did it fall on a Friday night, it happened in the face of a Category 4 hurricane that was just about to hit the Texas coast with a still-to-be-determined, massive loss of property and life. And we got not just one but two stories released as the storm’s destruction loomed — the signing of a ban on the transgendered serving in the military and the pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the scourge of Arizona law enforcement.
(There also was the resignation of failed Bond-villain-wannabe Sebastian Gorka, but he released the news, not the president. Then the White House said he was fired. Hilarity ensued.)
In any case, full points for callous opportunism, Mr. Trump.
Arpaio, whose conviction for contempt of court is the least of his multitude of sins (which include racial profiling, prisoner abuse, bogus prosecutions, failure to investigate sex crimes, misuse of funds, promoting “birtherism” and believe it or not, a fake assassination plot), had not even been sentenced yet. But Trump loves his buddy “Sheriff Joe” and will do anything, even trample the rule of law, to help a pal and slake the bloodthirst of the Trump base.
In the face of criticism, on Monday afternoon, at a White House press session with Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö, Trump once again pulled his patented, childlike “I meant to do that” routine and declared that he made the Arpaio pardon while the public was focused on Hurricane Harvey not to hide it but because, “Actually, in the middle of the hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally.”
Ratings? No matter what he says about why he did what he did, in the face of a major natural disaster and lost lives, it’s a statement of monumental, breathtaking insensitivity.
Trump then proceeded to rattle off from a prepared page a list of pardons made by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that he deemed more reprehensible, justifying his own bad pardon by citing the arguably bad pardons of predecessors, and Democrats at that. Historian and former GOP presidential adviser Bruce Bartlett described it as “The Trump doctrine — if any other president has done something wrong, he is permitted to do it too.” Yet somehow Trump failed to mention the pardons granted by Republicans Reagan, Bushes 41 and 43 and, most notoriously, Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
What’s awful is that Trump actually may have pulled it off — this storm is so overwhelming and terrifying that it’s hard to think of anything else and maybe his moves against the transgendered and in support of Arpaio will fade into that brand-new Oval Office wallpaper.
The storm also may succeed in taking the bite out of other news Trump may not have been expecting — the latest developments around his suspicious relationship with Russia. The Washington Post, The New York Times and Bloomberg News all have just reported on aspects of a business negotiation that took place while Trump’s presidential campaign was in full swing — a proposed deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. (Keep in mind that Trump has often said that he has no holdings or interests in Russia — but apparently not for lack of trying.)
Emails show Felix Sater, Trump’s shady Russian-American business associate, boasting to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about the Trump Tower plan: “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
As delusional as Sater sounds (among other things, he hoped to be named ambassador to the Bahamas), Trump signed a nonbinding letter of intent for the project and Cohen says he and Trump spoke about the deal on three occasions. Eventually it fell through. “Nevertheless,” The Post reports:
[T]he details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump’s business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine US-Russia relations.
The emails “also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.”
Meanwhile, on Monday, more than a quarter of the members of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council resigned, citing the president’s behavior around the fatal violence in Charlottesville and his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, but also noting, “You have given insufficient attention to the growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which all Americans depend, including those impacting the systems supporting our democratic election process.”
The president’s attempts to obfuscate and to divert from the truth are why the Mueller and congressional probes of Trump and Russian interference with the 2016 election remain so important (and why an independent nonpartisan commission investigating Russia is still a good idea). Like the old Post Office motto, neither the hurricane’s winds nor rains will stay the investigators from their appointed rounds.
There’s no doubt that Trump is still scheming how he will stop them. The Arpaio pardon may foreshadow what he intends to do, providing get-out-of-jail-free cards to all involved.
I wonder: What unknown, upcoming news event will he try to hide behind to snuff out the work of his accusers?
As Hurricane Harvey raged, the president tried to use the disaster as cover. It may have worked.
BY MICHAEL WINSHIP
On 9/11, as the World Trade Center collapsed and the Pentagon was in flames, Jo Moore, an adviser to one of British prime minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet members, sent a short email to her boss’ press office: “It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors expenses?”
This stunningly crass and cynical move — she was suggesting the use of a global tragedy to divert media attention from a minor story about pensions for local officials — ultimately forced Moore’s resignation.
But it comes from a long tradition of politicians and public officials trying to hide news behind other events or releasing it at inconvenient times when you hope few people will notice.
(In the days before he became president, John F. Kennedy, aware that many would object to the naming of his brother as attorney general, joked, “I think I’ll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2 a.m., look up and down the street, and if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’”)
Friday nights at the start of the weekend have become Washington’s golden hour for dumping bad news. Donald Trump’s White House already was using this timeless trick barely days after the Bible on which he was sworn in had a chance to cool off.
You’ll recall that he tried to rush his immigration ban executive order over the goal line on Friday, Jan. 27, hoping the crowd and the refs would have their collective backs turned away from the line of scrimmage. No such luck — on Saturday night, angry demonstrators thronged the airports and a federal judge quickly blocked Trump’s decree.
Even though the constant bombardment of the 24/7 news cycle may have diminished its effectiveness, the ploy has been hauled out several times since, including the Friday night they released the financial disclosure forms of some 180 presidential staffers, which revealed that in combination they were worth billions. So much for The People’s President.
But the latest news dump was the most brazen, a triple whammy, for not only did it fall on a Friday night, it happened in the face of a Category 4 hurricane that was just about to hit the Texas coast with a still-to-be-determined, massive loss of property and life. And we got not just one but two stories released as the storm’s destruction loomed — the signing of a ban on the transgendered serving in the military and the pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the scourge of Arizona law enforcement.
(There also was the resignation of failed Bond-villain-wannabe Sebastian Gorka, but he released the news, not the president. Then the White House said he was fired. Hilarity ensued.)
In any case, full points for callous opportunism, Mr. Trump.
Arpaio, whose conviction for contempt of court is the least of his multitude of sins (which include racial profiling, prisoner abuse, bogus prosecutions, failure to investigate sex crimes, misuse of funds, promoting “birtherism” and believe it or not, a fake assassination plot), had not even been sentenced yet. But Trump loves his buddy “Sheriff Joe” and will do anything, even trample the rule of law, to help a pal and slake the bloodthirst of the Trump base.
In the face of criticism, on Monday afternoon, at a White House press session with Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö, Trump once again pulled his patented, childlike “I meant to do that” routine and declared that he made the Arpaio pardon while the public was focused on Hurricane Harvey not to hide it but because, “Actually, in the middle of the hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally.”
Ratings? No matter what he says about why he did what he did, in the face of a major natural disaster and lost lives, it’s a statement of monumental, breathtaking insensitivity.
Trump then proceeded to rattle off from a prepared page a list of pardons made by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that he deemed more reprehensible, justifying his own bad pardon by citing the arguably bad pardons of predecessors, and Democrats at that. Historian and former GOP presidential adviser Bruce Bartlett described it as “The Trump doctrine — if any other president has done something wrong, he is permitted to do it too.” Yet somehow Trump failed to mention the pardons granted by Republicans Reagan, Bushes 41 and 43 and, most notoriously, Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
What’s awful is that Trump actually may have pulled it off — this storm is so overwhelming and terrifying that it’s hard to think of anything else and maybe his moves against the transgendered and in support of Arpaio will fade into that brand-new Oval Office wallpaper.
The storm also may succeed in taking the bite out of other news Trump may not have been expecting — the latest developments around his suspicious relationship with Russia. The Washington Post, The New York Times and Bloomberg News all have just reported on aspects of a business negotiation that took place while Trump’s presidential campaign was in full swing — a proposed deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. (Keep in mind that Trump has often said that he has no holdings or interests in Russia — but apparently not for lack of trying.)
Emails show Felix Sater, Trump’s shady Russian-American business associate, boasting to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about the Trump Tower plan: “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
As delusional as Sater sounds (among other things, he hoped to be named ambassador to the Bahamas), Trump signed a nonbinding letter of intent for the project and Cohen says he and Trump spoke about the deal on three occasions. Eventually it fell through. “Nevertheless,” The Post reports:
[T]he details of the deal, which have not previously been disclosed, provide evidence that Trump’s business was actively pursuing significant commercial interests in Russia at the same time he was campaigning to be president — and in a position to determine US-Russia relations.
The emails “also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.”
Meanwhile, on Monday, more than a quarter of the members of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council resigned, citing the president’s behavior around the fatal violence in Charlottesville and his withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, but also noting, “You have given insufficient attention to the growing threats to the cybersecurity of the critical systems upon which all Americans depend, including those impacting the systems supporting our democratic election process.”
The president’s attempts to obfuscate and to divert from the truth are why the Mueller and congressional probes of Trump and Russian interference with the 2016 election remain so important (and why an independent nonpartisan commission investigating Russia is still a good idea). Like the old Post Office motto, neither the hurricane’s winds nor rains will stay the investigators from their appointed rounds.
There’s no doubt that Trump is still scheming how he will stop them. The Arpaio pardon may foreshadow what he intends to do, providing get-out-of-jail-free cards to all involved.
I wonder: What unknown, upcoming news event will he try to hide behind to snuff out the work of his accusers?
Flood-Control Policy
How Donald Trump and Elaine Chao Sold Off Flood-Control Policy to the Highest Bidders
In mid-August, the administration moved to gut a necessary initiative to guarantee the flood resilience of infrastructure.
BY JOHN NICHOLS
Even before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, with devastating impact on the infrastructure of a flooded Houston and other communities, the Trump administration was thinking and acting on flood-control policies.
Unfortunately, the president’s team was thinking about what corporate interests wanted, and acting on their behalf — even as specialists on flooding issues pleaded with the administration to do otherwise. On Aug. 15, Trump and his team overturned an Obama-administration rule requiring that infrastructure projects, including roads and bridges, be designed to withstand the consequences of climate change — such as rising sea levels.
Experts in climate change, coastal management and environmental policy begged the administration to maintain the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard for “climate resilience.” The concern crossed traditional lines of ideology and partisanship, as free-market economic groups and Republican members of the House praised the standard.
But politically influential real-estate developers and builders lobbied for overturning Obama’s order. And they got their way, thanks in no small part to one of the industry’s most powerful allies in the administration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Since Trump took office on Jan. 20, Chao and other presidential appointees have rushed to sell off critical decisions to the highest bidders in a crony-capitalist frenzy the likes of which Washington has never before seen.
Most Americans have little sense of the extent of the crisis, because Trump steals the limelight — even from his own actions. For instance, the announcement of his executive order revoking the Obama initiative to promote sound infrastructure development in areas prone to increased flooding as a result of over-development and climate change came during the same press conference where Trump went on a bizarre and troubling rant about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There can be no question that the president’s startling comments about “fine people” marching with white supremacists to defend monuments to the Confederacy were newsworthy.
But so, too, was the administration’s move to implement an industry-allied transportation secretary’s “deconstruction of the regulatory state” when it comes to vital policies regarding flooding and climate change. Chao is a former international banker with Citicorp, Bank of America Capital Markets Group vice president and Wells Fargo board member who was associated with the corporate-friendly, deregulation-obsessed Heritage Foundation for years. She also has a long history of dismissing environmental concerns, and famously resigned from the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2015 after being informed that the foundation was preparing to increase support for the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” project.
That made Chao a fine fit for a Trump administration where cabinet secretaries and agency heads are busily dismantling environmental protections and initiatives to address climate change.
Chao was with Trump when he announced the gutting of Obama’s order to insure the “climate resilience” of infrastructure projects. As the Cabinet secretary who will be overseeing much of Trump’s $1 billion infrastructure initiative, she was at the ready on Aug. 15 with complaints about long environmental reviews and regulations and a promise that “This new executive order will slash the time it takes to get vital new infrastructure projects approved and delivered.”
Trump headed off to his golfing vacation after the press conference. But Chao was hard at work, assuring reporters: “At the Department of Transportation, we are already putting the administration’s principles into action.”
That’s what scared the Sierra Club, even before Harvey hit, even before the flooding in Houston and other Texas communities confirmed the vulnerability of our infrastructure in this new era of devastating floods.
“This is climate science denial at its most dangerous,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune in mid-August. He stressed that the administration’s moves were “putting vulnerable communities, federal employees and families at risk by throwing out any guarantee that our infrastructure will be safe.”
In mid-August, the administration moved to gut a necessary initiative to guarantee the flood resilience of infrastructure.
BY JOHN NICHOLS
Even before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, with devastating impact on the infrastructure of a flooded Houston and other communities, the Trump administration was thinking and acting on flood-control policies.
Unfortunately, the president’s team was thinking about what corporate interests wanted, and acting on their behalf — even as specialists on flooding issues pleaded with the administration to do otherwise. On Aug. 15, Trump and his team overturned an Obama-administration rule requiring that infrastructure projects, including roads and bridges, be designed to withstand the consequences of climate change — such as rising sea levels.
Experts in climate change, coastal management and environmental policy begged the administration to maintain the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard for “climate resilience.” The concern crossed traditional lines of ideology and partisanship, as free-market economic groups and Republican members of the House praised the standard.
But politically influential real-estate developers and builders lobbied for overturning Obama’s order. And they got their way, thanks in no small part to one of the industry’s most powerful allies in the administration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Since Trump took office on Jan. 20, Chao and other presidential appointees have rushed to sell off critical decisions to the highest bidders in a crony-capitalist frenzy the likes of which Washington has never before seen.
Most Americans have little sense of the extent of the crisis, because Trump steals the limelight — even from his own actions. For instance, the announcement of his executive order revoking the Obama initiative to promote sound infrastructure development in areas prone to increased flooding as a result of over-development and climate change came during the same press conference where Trump went on a bizarre and troubling rant about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
There can be no question that the president’s startling comments about “fine people” marching with white supremacists to defend monuments to the Confederacy were newsworthy.
But so, too, was the administration’s move to implement an industry-allied transportation secretary’s “deconstruction of the regulatory state” when it comes to vital policies regarding flooding and climate change. Chao is a former international banker with Citicorp, Bank of America Capital Markets Group vice president and Wells Fargo board member who was associated with the corporate-friendly, deregulation-obsessed Heritage Foundation for years. She also has a long history of dismissing environmental concerns, and famously resigned from the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2015 after being informed that the foundation was preparing to increase support for the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” project.
That made Chao a fine fit for a Trump administration where cabinet secretaries and agency heads are busily dismantling environmental protections and initiatives to address climate change.
Chao was with Trump when he announced the gutting of Obama’s order to insure the “climate resilience” of infrastructure projects. As the Cabinet secretary who will be overseeing much of Trump’s $1 billion infrastructure initiative, she was at the ready on Aug. 15 with complaints about long environmental reviews and regulations and a promise that “This new executive order will slash the time it takes to get vital new infrastructure projects approved and delivered.”
Trump headed off to his golfing vacation after the press conference. But Chao was hard at work, assuring reporters: “At the Department of Transportation, we are already putting the administration’s principles into action.”
That’s what scared the Sierra Club, even before Harvey hit, even before the flooding in Houston and other Texas communities confirmed the vulnerability of our infrastructure in this new era of devastating floods.
“This is climate science denial at its most dangerous,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune in mid-August. He stressed that the administration’s moves were “putting vulnerable communities, federal employees and families at risk by throwing out any guarantee that our infrastructure will be safe.”
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