February 13, 2025

Thursday, February 13, 2025. Annette’s News Roundup.

More Resistance to save Democracy.

My Fellow Members of Congress: This Is a Naked Power Grab

By Rosa DeLauro - Representative DeLauro represents Connecticut’s Third District and is the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

The Constitution is clear about many things. There are three branches of government. Presidents can only be elected to two terms. And Congress, not the executive branch, has the power of the purse, meaning the power to control federal spending. It is right there, as clear as day in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

This is a bedrock principle of our government, which President Trump and his unchecked billionaire buddy are attempting to subvert. They are trying to do so through a variety of avenues, including using social media platforms to berate elected officials into submitting to their demands, impounding funds — which is nothing less than stealing congressionally appropriated dollars promised to Americans — and empowering the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

What all these tactics to get around Congress have in common is simple: They are undemocratic. I will not surrender the authority of Congress and the Appropriations Committee, where I serve as ranking member, to the tide of cronyism and unlawful decision making that threatens to unravel our constitutional form of government.

The warning signs were clear at the end of the 118th Congress late last year. I watched what should have been an uncontroversial bill to prevent a government shutdown, which included funding for disaster relief and a variety of bipartisan priorities, get derailed and come close to defeat when an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, decided to intervene in the legislative process and browbeat Republicans into opposing their own leadership’s priorities.

The Appropriations Committees — Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate — negotiated the funding portions of this bill. In this committee, we carry out Congress’s power of the purse by providing the financial resources to programs and agencies that serve the American people.

It does not always go smoothly. I have long advocated for funding the government in an orderly and regular fashion by passing annual appropriations bills, a duty that has often been derailed by Republican dysfunction or demands for untenable spending cuts. At the end of the day, our work is about funding the basic services Americans rely on. It is a serious obligation, and it requires us to work together.

And we did. The process of governing, which requires give and take, produced a bipartisan package that would keep the government open. Our deal included $500 million in funding for child care, of which $250 million was provided to repair facilities damaged by disasters, and the authorization of $12.6 million in annual cancer research funding.

I must note the original bill also included foreign investment review requirements that would make sure American technologies and expertise are not being hijacked by foreign adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Musk’s Tesla has its largest vehicle factory in China, and he has taken multiple meetings with Chinese leaders as he seeks to expand his businesses there. Coincidence? I doubt it.

These bipartisan priorities would have passed overwhelmingly on the floor. But Mr. Musk happened to tune in that day, decided he disapproved, and posted about it on X over 100 times to his millions of followers, urging Republicans to kill the bill.

Republicans bent over backward to please their bankroller, passing a version of the bill that cut bipartisan priorities including the foreign investment review. Mr. Musk, who contributed over $288 million to the Trump campaign and other Republican candidates during the last election cycle, is clearly getting his money’s worth.

When he cannot achieve unilateral spending cuts by intimidating congressional Republicans with his billionaire allies, Mr. Trump also wants to use a process known as impoundment to steal funds intended to help American families and businesses. We have seen this scheme play out over the past two weeks.

Let me be clear that nowhere does the Constitution give the president unilateral power to impound funds appropriated by Congress. Not only would such a power be a direct challenge to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, but would run contrary to rulings from the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice and the Government Accountability Office. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power of the purse.

Yet Mr. Trump chose Russ Vought, an extremist who seems to believe the president is a king, to lead the Office of Management and Budget — the agency that manages the implementation of federal funds as appropriated by Congress.

Mr. Vought is an author of the Project 2025 manifesto, and he has a radical plan to dismantle Congress’s investments in our families’ health, safety and prosperity — utilizing, as he wrote in Project 2025, “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.”

Mr. Vought plans to abuse spending laws by operating as if the president has unchecked, unilateral power to impound funds. He made this clear when he refused to commit to upholding the law with respect to impoundment in his Senate confirmation hearing.

Justice Antonin Scalia took aim at supposed presidential impoundment powers in Clinton v. City of New York, saying: “President Nixon, the Mahatma Gandhi of all impounders, asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his ‘constitutional right’ to impound appropriated funds was ‘absolutely clear.’ Mr. Scalia went on to note that two years later, in Train v. City of New York, the court proved Nixon wrong.

Impoundment is a fanciful attempt to give the president the powers of a king, and it would be a disaster for our Republic.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency is clearly another attempt by wealthy donors like Mr. Musk to artificially insert their policy preferences into the governing process. He is trying to disguise this self-serving crusade as a blue-ribbon commission, but it has no legal authority and aims to substitute the will of a rich few for the will of the people. This is par for the course for Republicans and their Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to erode the Constitution at every turn and give the president unilateral authority.

Amid the chaos of a Trump presidency, the Constitution must be our bedrock. Leaders of both parties have affirmed what every schoolchild learns: that Congress holds the power of the purse, and that bills to raise revenue must begin in the House. The executive branch is not empowered to decide these things, and the courts must uphold the plain text of our founding document. (Op-Ed, New York Times).

From Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

@OccupyDemocrats
BREAKING: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounds the alarm about Donald Trump — says our nation's founders were "hellbent on ensuring that we don't have a monarchy" and we could "lose our democracy."

She really didn't hold back this time...

Sotomayor said that the "first way" the founders devised to avoid the ascent of a monarch was "to give Congress the power of the purse."

She made the remarks at Miami Dade College in Florida.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been working around the clock to undermine our system of checks and balances by unilaterally gutting agencies and systems that Congress voted to fund. It's a blatantly illegal power grab.

Sotomayor said that she maintains hope "that other actors in the system, whether it’s Congress or others, will follow the law, because it’s what we all take an oath of office to do."

However, she's understandably concerned that court orders will be ignored in the short term. By ramming through illegal executive orders, Trump can cripple and gut federal organizations while the legality is battled out — or he could try to outright ignore the decisions of the courts.

"Court decisions stand whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not," said Sotomayor. "It doesn’t change the foundation that it’s still a court order that someone will respect at some point."

She said that the court has faced challenges in the past and the system has been "tested" but thankfully the country "by and large" has "understood that the rule of law has helped us maintain our democracy."

She also warned against the Supreme Court overturning well-established precedents — something that the right-wing justices have become more willing to do, with the very notable example of overturning Roe v. Wade.

"We must be cognizant that every time we upset precedent, we upset people’s expectations and the stability of law," said Sotomayor. "It rocks the boat in a way that makes people uneasy about whether they’re protected or not protected by the law."

"We’re going to lose our democracy," said Sotomayor, unless Americans and "particularly" young people take steps to inform themselves well and combat the misinformation chaos created by the rise of the internet.

A Local Election with a Big Win.

Westchester, a county outside New York City.

One more thing.

A lesson to learn. All of us have to put our dollars and weight behind local elections.

Soon on board is the Wisconsin Election, on April 1st for Susan Crawford to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

I will keep saying this again and again. This a really important early state election with national repercussions.

Her win on April 1st will resonate across the nation - the first important vote since the Beast entered the White House.

Not only will she defeat a MAGA candidate, blessed by Trump, funded by Musk, but her win will keep the Wisconsin Court in liberal hands, protecting Abortion Rights and stopping Republican gerrymandering.

Donate now. Your dollars are critical. $5 -$20,000.

Here’s the link

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One argument we can make for Gender Justice.

Think the military lowered its standards for women? Think again.

The military has become more specific about the standards it expects personnel to meet.

Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot and a combat veteran, is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. Michael O’Hanlon is the Philip H. Knight chair in defense and strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”


In recent years, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been part of a movement questioning the full integration of women into the U.S. armed forces. This school of thought argues that women’s presence in the military has led to a lowering of standards of physical fitness and strength that largely explains the nation’s struggles on the battlefield in modern times.
Is Hegseth right? And, if so, should something be done about it?

Our answer to both questions is no.

Leave aside the fact that most young American men today do not meet military fitness requirements — and that, without women, who now make up 18 percent of the active-duty military, the services’ recent recruiting challenges would be much worse.

The fact, as a recent Brookings Institution event with several retired military officers underscored, is that military standards have not been lowered. Nor have easier standards been adopted for women.

A Marine Corps recruit from Lima Company, the first gender-integrated training class in San Diego, puts on safety equipment on April 21, 2021, at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)

In military specialties where relatively fewer meet the necessary physical standards, such as the infantry, there are smaller concentrations of women — as we might expect.


What has happened over the past two to three decades is that the military has become less arbitrary and more specific about the standards it requires military personnel to meet — largely because of the integration of women. For example, movie-watchers who remember the fabled sand obstacle course in 1982’s “An Officer and a Gentleman” may be interested to learn that particular challenge for future naval aviators has been changed — because it was recognized to be of limited relevance to their core duties.

Yet other standards remain plenty tough. Amy entered the military in the late 1990s as a fighter backseater and later a fighter pilot — and, while not required to complete that obstacle course, had to fulfill many other exacting physical demands. For example, given the distinct possibility that a Marine aviator might have to eject over water, aspiring pilots today are expected to be able to swim hundreds of yards to shore wearing a flight suit, and while helping ferry a potentially wounded comrade to safety as well.
When pilots learn to fly, the simulators they use do not know whether they are male or female, White or Black, or anything else about them.

Standards designed not just to evaluate overall physical fitness but to gauge ability to perform a specific job must remain gender-neutral — and they have. An aircraft carrier bobbing up and down on rough seas in a nighttime storm makes no allowance for the gender, race, religion, age or any other characteristic of those trying to set their planes down on the deck.

The same holds true for Air Force pilots and Army aviators. Since the 1970s, women in the Air Force, for instance, have been allowed to fly certain planes, beginning with wide-body aircraft. In the 1990s, they were permitted to fly fighters as well — if they could meet the same standards as men.

Throughout this period, overall accident rates in the Air Force declined, and aircraft performance across the force was excellent, with very modest losses, in all the nation’s wars from the 1990s to the present. While there has at times been cultural resistance to women taking on such roles, our experience suggests that, in the end, most men want the most skilled teammates — those who will have their back and help them emerge victorious from a fight. When women meet that standard, as they generally do, they are warmly welcomed and appreciated.
Take another example, from the Marine Corps.

Years ago, recruits training at Parris Island, South Carolina, were given specific numbers of push-ups to complete or a certain amount of time to run three miles. Sometimes — say, back in the Clinton era of the 1990s and the Bush era of the early 2000s — there were indeed different standards for the two sexes. But the Marines ultimately realized that fitness standards should be suited to the task.

Can a given recruit, male or female, load a certain number of mortar rounds on a seven-ton truck in a certain number of minutes? Can they help carry a wounded fellow Marine to safety? Can they carry a heavy rucksack on a long walk in bad weather at night and then prepare an ambush? It is against such gender-neutral standards that Marine recruits are now evaluated.

That said, President Donald Trump has asked a reasonable question: Why has the nation struggled so much in its modern wars? In fact, the United States struggled in Korea and Vietnam, too. We would submit that the main reason for the battlefield setbacks and military defeats of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been the difficult nature of counterinsurgency missions — as well as the shifting strategies civilian leaders have asked the armed forces to employ in these conflicts.

But when one examines the tactical and technical proficiency of the modern, gender-integrated military — in the Kosovo War (only two American fatalities, and a successful outcome); the rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003; the decimation of al-Qaeda leadership throughout the Middle East and South Asia by U.S. military forces as well as the CIA; the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq from 2014 through 2019; the continued successful deterrence of any Chinese attack on Taiwan — the results look quite good indeed.
Going forward, standards will need to be periodically reevaluated — and maintained, to keep our forces at high levels of preparedness.

But we also need to continue making the U.S. military, traditionally a culturally conservative organization, more welcoming to talented individuals of all genders, races and other characteristics provided they have the intellect, fitness, values and commitment to contribute to the nation’s defense.
Given the realities of modern war and the global security environment, we need them. (Washington Post).

Humor to save Democracy.

Musk’s Son Calls Trump’s Gaza Plan Idiotic.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a setback to Donald J. Trump’s plan to turn the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” on Wednesday the 4-year-old son of Elon Musk called the proposal “idiotic.”

“You’re saying that the United States would own Gaza,” X Musk told Trump in an Oval Office meeting. “Who would we be buying it from? And what would become of the two million Palestinians who call it home? Removing an entire population is tantamount to ethnic cleansing and contravenes international law.”

“You need to think this stuff through, dumbass,” X added.

X’s comments drew broad praise from leaders across the Middle East, including Jordan's King Abdullah II, who remarked, “Finally, there’s an adult in the room.”

A great candidate to support.

Before becoming the first Native American Cabinet secretary while serving under Biden, Deb Haaland served in the House from 2019 to 2021, and before that she chaired New Mexico’s Democratic Party. As Interior secretary, she oversaw the Biden administration’s moves to cut fossil fuels and boost clean energy. (Source. Yahoo News).

As expected, Deb Haaland, former Congresswoman and Secretary of the Interior, announces that she’s running for Governor of New Mexico.

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T13:22:14.256Z

One more thing.

A Great Action to do now.

Write or call your elected officials about this, while you still can,

For starters, let’s call the coup a coup—while we still can.

Censorship.

[Tuesday], the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.

“ Later in the day, they were refused access. It’s a clear and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from imposing prior restraints on anyone’s speech, let alone the press.(Source, Joyce Vance).

Disobedience to Court Orders.

The Trump administration sacked four FEMA employees and continues to freeze some of FEMA’s spending despite a court order blocking the freeze.(Source. Morning Memo).

the madness that Trump has announced he was “unanimously” elected Chairman of the Kennedy Center

You may want to heap on other complaints at the same time too… eg. threatening to seize Gaza or cutting medical research too.

Either way, keep on fighting for Democracy. Always.