He’s making a branch of the government obsolete

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy has come up with a method to keep paying members of the military, Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE during the shutdown. He didn’t like the look of soldiers going to foodbanks or, as Needham describes them, he wants to keep his favorite fascists happy. So he came up with a way to do that. All other federal workers don’t get paid during the shutdown and the nasty guy has been talking about refusing to give them back pay. Needham also wrote:

The New York Times headline writers are not meeting the moment at all, reporting this as Trump “expanding his authority” to spend federal money without Congress. This is not a thing. The president doesn’t have this authority. There’s nothing for him to expand. This is just sheer lawlessness where Trump is singlehandedly deciding how all tax dollars are spent. It’s from the same playbook as his idea of taking the revenue he got from singlehandedly imposing illegal tariffs, and illegally shuffling it over to farmers, who are being hurt by … his illegal tariffs. Gotta keep them voting Republican!

The NYT also fails by implying his expanding authority is a good thing. News stories I’ve heard are about farmers who are glad for a possible bailout but that won’t cover the loss of markets because of the tariffs. They’d rather have the markets. John Stoehr of the Editorial Board says this way of paying the troops is bad. The nasty guy is doing two bad things with the government’s money. The first he’s been doing since the start of this term, which is called impoundment. That means not spending the money Congress appropriated and is against the law. The Republicans who control Congress essentially said that’s fine with us. The big rescission package approved last summer merely confirmed what the nasty guy was already doing. That impoundment got worse after the shutdown started because the nasty guy used “ideological targeting” – withholding $27 billion from Democratic districts. This move to pay the troops after the start of the shutdown is the second money thing the nasty guy is doing. The money Congress designated for one purpose he is now using for another purpose. This is “a violation of the Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution, which was written to make sure the people don’t lose control of their money.” The Antideficiency Act reinforced that Constitutional clause by saying, as Stoehr summarized, “it’s a felony for anyone in government to spend any money on anything that’s not approved by the Congress.” This adds to the understanding the nasty guy views the Constitution and law as a suggestion he may ignore. It also means he views blue states and cities as sources of income to be extracted as he controls their population. If he can refuse to spend money on things Congress tells him to spend it on and spends money on things Congress didn’t designate, then he doesn’t need Congress. He’s made a branch of the government obsolete. Any court that says no to the nasty guy will see its decision appealed to the Supremes. Because they are corrupt they will not stop this crime. Republicans in Congress, meaning Congress through official action, will not stop this crime and will not try to reclaim their power of the purse. Which means the remedy can only come from Democrats. The nasty guy has also put them in the position that if they make a deal with him to end the shutdown they become complicit in these crimes. I hope they recognize that because of these crimes any deal they make he will override. How can Democrats wield the power to force the nasty guy to face the consequences of these crimes? Alas, Stoehr doesn’t know exactly. Though the part he does know involves the people understanding this crime which seems obscure and right now leads to the good thing of troops being paid. And it involves the people continuing to protest. Max Burns of Kos wrote about other aspects of the crime. Things like, “unpaid troops will quickly lose their patience with [Trump’s] destructive shutdown antics.” And Republican senators griped because the reasons he gives for being able to pay the troops during the shutdown keep changing. Another aspect of the crime is the nasty guy saying he can divert the money the government collected through his illegal tariffs to pay the farmers hurt by those tariffs. Or maybe he’ll divert to maintain food assistance for pregnant women, mothers, and young children. Again, doing that without Congressional authorization is illegal.

It’s easy to imagine Trump ramping up tariffs simply to swell a war chest he alone oversees, free of congressional oversight and used solely to advance his personal goals. $10 billion to ICE for the purchase of military weaponry? Done. No purpose is too self-interested or shady in a system where Trump controls the purse strings of a parallel government treasury. ... Trump’s latest federal shutdown has offered him yet another testing ground for the unconstitutional power grabs that define his second term. His administration has made clear it intends to press forward unless Congress or the courts stop them.

In the pundit roundup for Kos from Monday, ten days ago Greg Dworkin included a pair of tweets. First from NewsWire, a headline:

U.S. BEEF PRICES SOAR TO ALL-TIME HIGH

Response from scary lawyerguy

If you doubt the media bias *in Trump's favor* consider that this general topic (food prices) was covered obsessively under Biden and used by the media to take down his presidency and is now barely mentioned and when it is, no blame is put on Trump for what's happening.

In response to a tweet quoting Mike Johnson saying Republicans the ones fixing healthcare, see the Big Brutal Bill, Jesse Ferguson tweeted:

This bill was... - The largest cut to Medicaid in American history - seniors in nursing homes, kids health care - Over 500 rural hospitals are in jeopardy of closing - 1-in-4 nursing homes say they may have to close The GOP calls that "fixing health care"

Anat Shenker-Osorio of Weekend Reading discussed pollingism, the belief that a political race can be mapped because voters make decisions based on conscious preferences, those preferences are discernible by polls, and winning in polls can translate to winning in the real world. An alternative view sees voters with opinions that change with relationships and societal discourse. Repeated comments of family, trusted messengers, and persistent media narratives change opinion. The author calls this magnetism. That means the politician must establish the right conversation, to be attractive. One must have a cause to draw people and do so from a place from broadly shared values, not prejudices.

In short, the first step to winning an election is making it about what you can win on. Strategic campaigns begin with the question: How do I force the issues and conversations that most benefit my side to the fore?

In the comments a tweet by Will Saletan quoted and provided a link to an article in The Bulwark:

To bring a democracy under authoritarian control, you need more than a strongman. You need politicians who will assure the public, as we slide toward one-man rule, that nothing odd is happening. That’s the role Johnson is playing in Trump’s takeover.

Meidas Touch tweeted a quote from a source he didn’t identify:

JD Vance lied repeatedly on Sunday shows with his trademark smug insufferability. Trump lies like a huckster televangelist – like he knows he’s trying to con you with obvious bs so he keeps checking to see if you are buying it and can’t believe his luck that so many are. Mike Johnson lies with a monotone smooth sliminess that reminds me of the character Kevin Spacey played in The Usual Suspects. But Vance tells preposterous lies with a tone of indignancy if you dare suggest that he might be full of s---.

Yesterday I heard Johnson complain that Democrats want to prosecute the nasty guy for everything he does. I wanted to shout through my radio to say that’s because everything he does is a crime. In last Saturday’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Ronald Brownstein.

The #NoKingsOct18 website lists ~65 (!) separate events across Southern California alone. @SpeakerJohnson has stamped all of those people as anti-American. It's his "deplorables" moment, tho it hasn't sparked anything like the media attn HRC faced. Why's that any less of a slur?