No ruling by the courts, not even one by the U.S. Supreme Court, will change the fact that Los Angeles’ housing costs are out of reach for most people. Many of us are one missed paycheck, illness or mistake away from ending up in a tent on the sidewalk, and an anti-camping ordinance won’t stop people from doing what they must to survive.
We are all frustrated by the street conditions, but instead of brutal sweeps that shuffle people like trash from one corner to the next, our leaders should focus on affordable housing and protecting tenants from eviction.
Rae Huang, Los Angeles
The writer is senior organizer with the group Housing Now.
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To the editor: Those of us who grew up in the 1950s never saw our cities’ sidewalks or parks overrun with tents pitched by the unhoused.
Yes, we had seen homeless encampments elsewhere. They typically were located on the outskirts of towns, along railroad tracks and on stream beds.
Back then, vagrancy laws barred people from camping within city limits. Furthermore, the number of unhoused people was kept low by two factors: Jobs were abundant, and state mental hospitals housed thousands of people who would have otherwise lived on the street.
Within a few decades momentous changes steadily accelerated homelessness. Courts struck down vagrancy laws. Psychiatric hospitals were emptied. Automation, computerization and job outsourcing to foreign countries diminished employment opportunities.
Evidently the foreseeable downsides of those changes escaped our leaders’ notice — that, or there was no political upside to addressing these downsides. It’s time to pay the homelessness piper.
Betty Turner, Sherman Oaks
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To the editor: Unfortunately, homeless encampments eventually become public health hazards. How do we balance the rights of unhoused individuals against the rights of the communities affected by encampments?
Despite all the good intentions and funds that have been directed toward alleviating the problem, nothing seems to have long-term impact.
There are deeper systemic issues at play here that have to do with the income inequalities that exist in our society and need to be solved at the federal level. Until that happens (and I’m not holding my breath), local efforts will continue to have limited effect.
John Beckman, Chino Hills
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To the editor: Cities can’t remove encampments unless there is a place for unhoused residents to go.
A few months ago, The Times reported on a study that found there were more than 100 vacant, government-owned parcels in L.A. that could be used for housing. These properties could provide toilets, water, electricity and even a physical address where one could get mail.
The Supreme Court could correct Mitch McConnell’s huge mistake
Opinion by Dean Obeidallah, CNN – December 24, 2023
The holiday season is filled with classic movies like “A Christmas Carol” that tell us we still have time to right the wrongs of the past. Well, now the US Supreme Court — even without a visit from the ghost of “Christmas yet to come” — may get the chance to correct the wrongs of GOP senators like Mitch McConnell, who refused to convict former President Donald Trump during his January 6 impeachment trial.
The Supreme Court justices can do so by agreeing with the Colorado Supreme Court’s recent decision that found Trump engaged in an insurrection and was therefore “disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
As a reminder, shortly after January 6, 2021, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting an insurrection. That single article of impeachment — approved by 10 House Republicans along with all the Democrats in the lower chamber — specifically cited Section 3 of the 14th Amendment as a reason to move forward with the proceedings.
While the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds threshold necessary to convict Trump, the vote did garner the support of a simple majority (57-43) that included seven Republicans. That means the majority of both chambers of Congress voted in favor of removing Trump from office given his role in the January 6 insurrection.
After the vote was tallied, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor to brutally slam Trump for his actions. He declared that on January 6, 2021, “American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.” He then made it clear that Trump was to blame: “They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
McConnell added, “Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President (Mike) Pence was in danger, even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters, the president sent a further tweet attacking his vice president.”
The GOP Senate leader went on to call out Trump’s response during the attack, saying that “a mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name” and former aides and allies begged him to publicly call off the attack. “But the president did not act swiftly,” McConnell said. “Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election.”
However, despite those strong words, McConnell voted to acquit because Trump was already out of office at the time of the trial, and in the senator’s view, “We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.” If the Senate had convicted Trump instead, it could have barred him from running for federal office again.
Putting aside whether McConnell was correct from a constitutional point of view, the courts now have the power to “disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen.” That is exactly what the Colorado Supreme Court did with their 4-3 ruling. As the court laid out, Trump’s goal with the insurrection, which “he himself conceived and set in motion,” was to “prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election and stop the peaceful transfer of power.” And like McConnell, who pointed out that Trump did not act quickly to call an end to the insurrection, the Colorado Supreme Court noted Trump “continued to support it” with his tweet that day targeting Pence.
No one knows with any certainty what the US Supreme Court will rule in this case. In fact, lost in much of the discussion is the question of whether Trump will formally appeal the Colorado ruling, as he has vowed to do.
But as I discussed Thursday on my SiriusXM radio show with Mario Nicolais — one of the lawyers who won the case to disqualify Trump from the ballot in Colorado — Trump must appreciate the risk that the US Supreme Court could rule against him. If that happens, Trump would be definitively barred from holding office ever again, whereas he would only be barred from the ballot in Colorado — a state he lost to Joe Biden by more than 13 points in 2020 — if the ruling stands.
If Trump appeals and the US Supreme Court hears the case, they will have the opportunity to uphold the US Constitution by disqualifying Trump from serving in any office for his role in the January 6 insurrection, in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. And redressing these past wrongs would make them very much like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning.
Thousands join migrant caravan in Mexico ahead of Secretary of State Blinken’s visit to the capital
Edgar H. Clemente – December 24, 2023
Migrants depart from Tapachula, Mexico, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2023. The caravan started the trek north through Mexico just days before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Mexico City to discuss new agreements to control the surge of migrants seeking entry into the United States. (AP Photo/Edgar Hernandez Clemente)
TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — A sprawling caravan of migrants from Central America, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries trekked through Mexico on Sunday, heading toward the U.S. border. The procession came just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Mexico City to hammer out new agreements to control the surge of migrants seeking entry into the United States.
The caravan, estimated at around 6,000 people, many of them families with young children, is the largest in more than a year, a clear indication that joint efforts by the Biden administration and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government to deter migration are falling short.
The Christmas Eve caravan departed from the city of Tapachula, near the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Security forces looked on in what appeared to be a repeat of past tactics when authorities waited for the marchers to tire out and then offered them a form of temporary legal status that is used by many to continue their journey northward.
“We’ve been waiting here for three or four months without an answer,” said Cristian Rivera, traveling alone, having left his wife and child in his native Honduras. “Hopefully with this march there will be a change and we can get the permission we need to head north.”
López Obrador in May agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.
But that deal, aimed at curbing a post-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as the number of migrants once again surges, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment among conservative voters in the U.S.
This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested per day at the U.S. southwest border. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had to suspend cross-border rail traffic in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso as migrants were riding atop freight trains.
Arrests for illegal crossing topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s last two fiscal years, reflecting technological changes that have made it easier for migrants to leave home to escape poverty, natural disasters, political repression and organized crime.
On Friday, López Obrador said he was willing to work again with the U.S. to address concerns about migration. But he also urged the Biden administration to ease sanctions on leftist governments in Cuba and Venezuela — where about 20% of 617,865 migrants encountered nationwide in October and November hail from — and send more aid to developing countries in Latin America and beyond.
“That is what we are going to discuss, it is not just contention,” López Obrador said at a press briefing Friday following a phone conversation the day before with President Joe Biden to pave the way for the high level U.S. delegation.
The U.S. delegation, which will meet the Mexican president on Wednesday, will also include Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.
Mexico’s ability to assist the U.S. may be limited, however. In December, the government halted a program to repatriate and transfer migrants inside Mexico due to a lack of funds. So far this year, Mexico has detected more than 680,000 migrants living illegally in the country, while the number of foreigners seeking asylum in the country has reached a record 137,000.
Sunday’s caravan was the largest since June 2022, when a similarly sized group departed as Biden hosted leaders in Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas. Another march departed Mexico in October, coinciding with a summit organized by López Obrador to discuss the migration crisis with regional leaders. A month later, 3,000 migrants blocked for more than 30 hours the main border crossing with Guatemala.
Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.
STORY: Mexican authorities on Friday sent a planeload of migrants from Piedras Negras, near the US border, to southern Mexico to be returned to their countries of origin.
The move came just hours after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced that his government will reinforce measures to contain migration.
As the United States copes with record numbers of people trying to reach the U.S. border, Mexico is looking to help.
“We will boost as much as we can to help maintain an orderly flow,” said Lopez Obrador, adding “Recently, there was an abnormal surge.”
Lopez Obrador’s comments came a day after he spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden.
Both agreed that more enforcement was needed at their shared frontier, as record numbers of migrants disrupt border trade.
This year, the number of migrants crossing the perilous Darien Gap straddling Colombia and Central America topped half a million – double that of last year’s record.
News of Lopez Obrador’s comments reached migrants as they made their way through Mexico to the U.S. border.
Honduran migrant Kerlin Silva said the new rules might mean he won’t be able to, (quote) “fulfill the American dream.”
According to the United Nations, migrants are heading through Mexico to the U.S. to escape violence, economic distress, and the negative impacts of climate change.
Lopez Obrador said Mexico would also step up containment efforts on its southern border with Guatemala as his government seeks agreements with other countries to manage the northbound migrant flows.
Top U.S. officials are set to visit Mexico next week to follow up on the call between Lopez Obrador and Biden.
It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love
Thomas L. Friedman – December 22, 2023
Credit…Amir Levy/Getty Images
It is time for the Biden administration to give Israel more than just gentle nudges about how it would be kind of, sort of nice if Israel could fight this war in Gaza without killing thousands of civilians.
It’s time for the U.S. to stop wasting time searching for the perfect U.N. cease-fire resolution on Gaza.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel that its war’s aim of wiping Hamas off the face of the earth is not going to be achieved — at least not at a cost that the U.S. or the world will tolerate, or that Israel should want.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel how to declare victory in Gaza and go home, because right now the Israeli prime minister is utterly useless as a leader: He is — unbelievably — prioritizing his own electoral needs over the interests of Israelis, not to mention the interests of Israel’s best friend, President Biden.
It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel to put the following offer on the table to Hamas: total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, in return for all the Israeli hostages and a permanent cease-fire under international supervision, including U.S., NATO and Arab observers. And no exchange of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
What would the advantages of this approach be for Israel?
First, if I am reading the mood in Israel correctly these days, the overwhelming majority of the country today wants their 120-plus hostages returned — over and above any other war aims. Israel is a small country. Many, many Israelis know someone — or know someone who knows someone — with a loved one taken hostage or killed in Gaza.
The hostage issue is making Israelis crazy, for good reason, and it’s making rational military decision-making there impossible — especially as many experts believe the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has now surrounded himself with Israeli hostages as human shields and it will be impossible to kill him without also killing many of them. Any Israeli government that does that would sow the wind and reap the whirlwind of wrath from the Israeli public.
Second, Israel has inflicted vast damage on Gaza’s main urban areas and on Hamas’s tunnel network and killed thousands of Hamas fighters, along with, tragically, thousands of the Gazan civilians among whom Hamas embedded itself. Hamas as a military organization deserved to be punished and pummeled, and it has been considerably degraded. But that huge toll of killed, wounded and displaced Gazan civilians has produced a humanitarian disaster. And Israel has no plan — indeed, has not had a plan since the start of the war — for how this humanitarian crisis will be managed and remediated, and how to induce non-Hamas Palestinians and Arabs to come forward and partner with Israel to repair and run a postwar Gaza.
There is also increasing discomfort in the Israel Defense Forces leadership over the fact that it is being asked by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu to fight a war in Gaza without a clearly defined political objective, timetable or mechanism to win and hold the peace.
My view: Israel should just get out and let the person who started this terrible war, knowing but not caring that it would lead to the death and destruction of thousands of innocent Gazans, manage the cleanup. And that is the Hamas leader, Sinwar. The best way to discredit and destroy Sinwar is for Israel to leave Gaza and make him come out of his tunnel, face his people and the world and own Gaza’s rebuilding on his own.
I can tell you from experience what I think will happen. On the first day, Sinwar will strut around the rubble of Gaza like a peacock, declaring how he and his men inflicted terrible damage on the Jews, and supporters will carry him on their shoulders, shouting “Allahu akbar.”
On Day 2, with the Israelis gone, they will scream at Sinwar publicly and privately: What were you thinking? Who gave you permission to launch this war? Who is going to repair my home? Who is going to bring back my loved ones? How are you going to get any help rebuilding Gaza if you keep on lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv? You thought Hezbollah, the West Bankers, Israeli Arabs and Iran would all jump full-scale into this war and rise up against the Jews. It didn’t happen — except at some American colleges — and now all we have are ruins and the dead.
How do I know that will happen? Because it’s what happened in Lebanon in 2006, when Hassan Nasrallah foolishly launched an unprovoked war against Israel, leading to enormous destruction in Shiite villages both in the south and around Beirut.
How do I know that will happen? Because it is already happening. Consider this Bloomberg report from Dec. 11:
Since the war, life in Gaza — which never was easy — has become unbearable. And while most Palestinians are furious at Israel, some are also expressing anger at Hamas, which has ruled the strip since 2007, when it threw out the Palestinian Authority through a brief and violent civil war. “Hand over the hostages and stop the war,” Rahaf Hneideq, a Gaza-based professor of Islamic studies, wrote to Hamas on Facebook. “Enough death, enough destruction. Stop the displacement. Don’t your people deserve that?”
How do I know that will happen? Because while polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research show support for Hamas growing in the West Bank since Oct. 7 — which are really signs of contempt for the Palestinian Authority and antipathy to the violent Jewish settlers — support for Hamas in Gaza, which usually rises during wars, has not significantly increased. Moreover, despite the increase in Hamas popularity in the West Bank, “the majority in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip does not support Hamas,” Khalil Shikaki, the director of the P.C.P.S.R., found.
And if you follow news of Hamas politics, you will have noticed reports this week of significant tension between Sinwar and Hamas leaders abroad, who have begun — to Sinwar’s apparent rage — talks with leaders from the West Bank Palestinian Authority about reunifying and revamping the Palestinian leadership after the war to enable some kind of long-term peace arrangement with Israel.
Israel has a choice: It can own Gaza’s future forever, with Israel’s completely dysfunctional relationship between the army and the far-right cabinet, which will never agree on collaborating with any Palestinian Authority, leading to Israel inheriting one of the worst humanitarian disasters on the planet. Or it can get out now, get back its hostages and let Sinwar and his friends own that problem — as they should. Let Hamas have to tell Gazans that there will be no rebuilding, just more of its endless war to destroy the Jews. Let’s see how long that lasts.
And if Hamas tries that, let the U.S. and its allies show the whole world that there is only one reason Gazans are dying another day longer, and that it is because Hamas won’t accept a cease-fire.
From the start of this war, there has been an asymmetry: Israel, a democracy, has to answer every day for its actions and mistakes and excesses. Sinwar has never had to for a minute. Time to turn the tables.
And speaking of turning the tables — Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis pray five times a day for one thing: that Israel will stay in Gaza forever. They want Israel militarily, economically, diplomatically and morally overstretched. The absolute worst news they could get is to hear that Israel is offering total withdrawal for a return of all hostages and an internationally monitored cease-fire that will include U.S. and NATO supervision.
And the absolute worst news that Russia and China could get is that Biden arranged this end to the war.
Indeed, Hezbollah will go into immediate panic mode, saying to itself: Do you mean that if we now keep shelling northern Israel we will face the total, undivided wrath of the Israeli Army and Air Force and lose all justification for our attacks on Israel? Ditto the Houthis.
Israel has done enormous damage to Hamas’s military infrastructure, but at a cost to innocent civilians in Gaza that cannot be morally or strategically justified any longer. Offering Hamas a total withdrawal and internationally monitored cease-fire — in return for all hostages — will shift all of the political, military, diplomatic and moral pressure onto Sinwar. And it won’t just be for one day, but for the future.
I also have no doubt that the Israeli Army can fortify its Gaza border, apply all the lessons of its pre-Oct. 7 mistakes and make sure Hamas can never smuggle in the arms that it did again.
No, it is not the fairy-tale ending Israelis may have hoped for after Oct. 7 — a Gaza Strip utterly free of any trace of Hamas, permanently controlled by Israel and some totally compliant fantasy Palestinian partner and all the reconstruction paid for by the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia. But that was always a fairy tale.
Perfect is never on the table in Gaza. Israel needs to coolly, rationally think through its options, and the Biden administration needs to stop whispering quietly that Israel should reconsider its war aims and tactics. The Biden team needs to engage Israelis in a loud, blunt, no-holds-barred discussion about how much it has already achieved militarily, how best to consolidate those gains and how to end this war with some kind of new balance of power in Israel’s favor — before Israel sinks itself into the quicksand of Gaza, chasing a perfect victory that is a mirage.
‘A Very Large Earthquake’: How Trump Could Decimate the Civil Service
Ian Ward – December 20, 2023
For the past two decades, Max Stier has distinguished himself as Washington’s foremost champion of the federal civil service, a quiet but influential voice in favor of practical reforms to make federal bureaucracy work better both for the people who serve in it and for the people that it serves. The Partnership for Public Service — the nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that Stier helped found in 2001 and still runs today — works largely behind the scenes in Washington to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy, doing everything from crafting common sense proposals for modernizing government programs to hosting a much-beloved annual awards ceremony honoring the country’s top performing civil servants.
These days, though, Stier is increasingly preoccupied with what he sees as a fundamental threat to that work: former President Donald Trump’s sweeping proposal to convert thousands of career civil servants into political appointees if he wins a second term in the White House. That plan — which has won the support of powerful, Trump-aligned conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute — is modeled on an executive order from Trump’s first term that redesignated 20,000 civil servants in policy-related positions as “Schedule F” employees, thereby allowing them to be fired unilaterally by the president.
The Biden administration reversed the Trump administration’s order upon assuming office in 2021, but Trump has vowed to reinstitute an expanded version of the Schedule F order if he is reelected in 2024, converting as many as 50,000 civil servants into political appointees and stripping them of the career protections that they currently enjoy.
For Stier, Trump’s proposal is as ironic as it is dangerous. Although Trump and his allies have argued that their plan is necessary to vanquish the “deep state” that allegedly undermined Republican policy initiatives during Trump’s first term, Stier argues that a revamped order on Schedule F would in fact go a long way toward creating the sort of “deep state” that conservatives now rail against.
“If you were to convert a significant segment of that professional workforce into one that is being chosen by political fiat, then you end up in a system that is responsive to the political desires of the individual rather than the larger responsibilities to the Constitution and to law,” Stier said when I spoke to him recently. “You wind up with a workforce that is not only going to deliver poor service, but also that is going to be a tool for retribution and actions that are contrary to our democratic system.”
Even so, Stier cautioned, Americans should not underestimate the damage that the reforms would do to the federal government’s ability to deliver basic services in a timely and efficient manner. “At the end of the day, it’s intuitive,” he said. “If you are selecting people on the basis of their political persuasion or their loyalty as opposed to their expertise and their commitment to the public good, you’re going to wind up with less good service and more risk for the American people.”
The following has been edited for concision and clarity.
How seismic would the changes wrought by Trump’s proposal be? Is there any precedent for it?
It would be a very large earthquake. There is precedent, but it’s precedent from the 19th century. In effect, when you talk about implementing Schedule F, you’re talking about turning the clock back to the late 19th century, when our government operated under the spoils system. That all changed, importantly, when President [James] Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled job seeker [in 1881], resulting in the passage of the first piece of legislation that professionalized our government, the Pendleton Act.
Frankly, Schedule F is now used as a handle for a larger set of dramatic changes to our government, but they are entirely designed to — and will have the consequence of — making our government responsive to the will of the individual holder of the office of the president rather than the broader allegiance to our Constitution and the rule of law.
Is there evidence that a merit-based civil service — as opposed to a bureaucracy run according to the spoils system — actually makes the government more effective?
No question. One way to know that is to look at our peer countries across the world, and the reality is that every effective democracy on the planet today has a professionalized, merit-based civil service that is the core of their governmental function. If anything, we are an outlier in the numbers and the extent to which political appointees are [spread] throughout government institutions. We have 4,000 political appointments that are made by a president — and that is dramatically more than anybody else out there. So one direct piece of evidence is to look at our peers to see how capability and government performance are directly related to the professional capability of the other civil service. In our own country, the same is true. We have many instances in which organizations have foundered when they’ve had too many political appointees.
At the end of the day, it’s intuitive: If you are selecting people on the basis of their political persuasion or their loyalty as opposed to their expertise and their commitment to the public good, you’re going to wind up with less good service and more risk for the American people.
Do we know which career positions would likely be converted to appointed positions under a second Trump administration?
The best evidence we have so far is what was attempted at the back end of the last Trump administration. At that point, they were looking at converting effectively the entire Office of Management and Budget. For most people, that’s just another government acronym, but in fact, it’s the nerve center of the entire government and the office that really is responsible for coordinating and allocating all the resources of our government — and it’s one of the most capable and professionalized elements of our government.
If you converted just those positions alone, then all kinds of choices in government would be made not on the basis of what delivers the best service to the public, and not on the basis of choosing according to transparent criteria that match Congress’ objective desires. They would be entirely based on the political implications — and that is a worse world.
What about beyond OMB?
We don’t know what the full sweep would be, but it’s also true that you don’t have to convert all the positions to have a much larger impact. The chill that would exist for the larger workforce would be profound. For instance, we currently have a system that respects whistleblowers in order to make sure that if something illegal is occurring inside an agency, the individuals who raise them are actually protected. In a world with Schedule F, that would be incredibly hard to see that happening.
Which areas of the government stand to suffer the most under a return to the “spoils system,” as you called it? What would that look like in terms of the delivery of government services?
It depends a lot on how broad of a brush is ultimately wielded in making the changes. You can start from the most obvious, life-saving components of our government.
If you ask the public today if they want a professional government service, they say “yes” in very, very large majorities. So I think that the intuitive point is very strong. The challenge is that there’s a narrative that has been sold around this notion of a deep state, which is just wrong. Indeed, the proposals that are on the table would create a deep state, rather than the effective state that we all should be pursuing.
What do you mean?
I don’t think we have a deep state today. The vast bulk of career civil servants understand that their role is to execute the policy choices that our elected leaders make and that they have a responsibility to follow the law and to make sure their actions are consistent with the Constitution. But if you were to convert a significant segment of that professional workforce into one that is being chosen by political fiat, then you end up in a system that is responsive to the political desires of the individual rather than the larger responsibilities to the Constitution and to law.
You wind up with a workforce that is not only going to deliver poor service, but also that is going to be a tool for retribution and actions that are contrary to our democratic system.
The Biden administration has issued a rule that’s designed to limit the scope and efficacy of any subsequent Schedule F reforms by future administrations. How effective do you think that rule will be?
It’s an important effort and recognition that it would be wrong and damaging. At the end of the day, though, Congress speaking to this would be much more efficacious. I actually think that, even absent the rule or legislation, there would be real legal reasons to challenge the creation of something like Schedule F.
What would a legal challenge look like?
There are statutes that Congress passed that enshrined the merit principles, and one of the main principles is that employees should actually be hired on the basis of merit and not on the basis of politics. So I believe there would be credible and important legal questions that could be raised about those kinds of changes.
But again, I’m not suggesting that they necessarily win — and in the meantime, an awful lot of damage could happen. The very effort and attempt [to reimplement schedule F] would be incredibly damaging in and of itself, so people should not feel sanguine about the possibility that this couldn’t happen or could be delayed, because the harm is profound even in just attempting to do so.
Past administrations from both parties have struggled to fill the 4,000 appointed jobs that currently exist. Is it feasible for a future administration to fill somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 appointed roles?
The biggest challenge in placing political appointees comes from the Senate confirmation process and all the delays and difficulties that are involved in actually nominating and getting the Senate to confirm them. That’s a deeply broken process. But none of these positions would require that. So I don’t believe that people should be heartened by the notion that they can convert them and it won’t matter because they won’t be able to fill those jobs. I don’t think that is either a true or adequate answer to the problem.
I imagine many people reading this will think, “Well, our government doesn’t work all that efficiently as it is, so what’s the problem with making it a little bit less efficient?” How do you answer that?
This is a difference in kind and not in degree. It’s not like, Yeah, we might just have a slightly less efficient government. No — we would actually have a government that fundamentally fails in its responsibilities to the American people. It would become an instrument of political achievement rather than an instrument of problem-solving and addressing critical issues for the public.
But I think the point is a very important one, because the American public should demand even better than they’re getting right now from our government. I believe that there actually are really good ways of improving the capability of the civil service that do not involve burning down our government. That’s fundamentally the choice that is here to be made. I don’t think it’s efficient to simply say that Schedule F is bad. You also have to offer a plan of attack on improving our government — and frankly, we have that. We have a whole roadmap of the changes that should take place. But the reality is that none of it should be viewed as an indictment of career public servants. It’s an indictment of the leadership over the years that has failed to modernize and invest in the systems of our government.
What does that roadmap look like?
To give one example, the pay system is based on a law from 1949 and it fundamentally hasn’t been modernized since then. That ought to be modernized, because it was built at an age in which our federal workforce was largely clerical, whereas today it’s largely professional. The system isn’t designed for market connectivity to get the technologists, the AI specialists and so on that are necessary to deliver the best services to the public.
There are changes that ought to take place in the way accountability is done in our government. You can actually fire federal employees — and many do leave because they’re threatened with being fired for performance issues — but the systems should be modernized and updated and simplified. There are lots of things that can be done that would actually improve the public service and that would result in better outcomes for the public, rather than blowing it up.
What happens to those reforms in a world with Schedule F? Is there a kind of dual-track future where you can do sensible civil service reform even with Schedule F in place, or are they completely crosswise with each other?
I think they’re crosswise because they come from different visions. One vision is a spoils system, and the other is a professional, capable and effective state. Those are very, very different visions, so I don’t think you can marry the two.
Ultimately, the Schedule F approach swamps the entire system. It cuts the legs out from the idea that we want people who are not only selected on the basis of their capabilities but also based on the fact that their loyalty is to the rule of law and our Constitution rather than to the individual [in power]. Again, we have way too many political appointees as it is, and it really is important for people to see that we are such an outlier in the world — in a bad way.
I suspect that some people on the right simply do not care if government efficiency suffers as a result of these reforms. In fact, that might be part of the goal. How do you think about appealing to people who might be thinking about it that way?
There’s an entirely legitimate and appropriate debate to be had about the role of our government. But there should be no debate about ensuring that, whatever the public actually desires the government to do, it’s done well and effectively. The vast majority of civil servants are focused on national security issues — on actually keeping us safe. I don’t think there are very many Americans who would dispute the value of that outcome or the need for an effective government to do it.
How aware are people in Washington of the potential consequences of these reforms? And how prepared do you think they are to deal with them?
I do not believe that the public has good insight into the nasty consequences that would come out of the proposals that are part of Project 2025. At the end of the day, if you look at the polling [about the public’s view of the civil service] it’s clear as can be: Americans actually want the people who are serving them to be chosen because they’re the most expert and capable — not because they’ve sworn loyalty to the person in the Oval Office.
Putin: There must be severe action against ‘foreign agents’ who help Ukraine, destabilize Russia
Nate Ostiller – December 20, 2023
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article said that Sergei Skripal’s wife was injured in the poison attack. Skripal’s daughter Yuliia, not his wife, was injured.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin said that there must be a “severe” response against foreign intelligence services that “directly” support Ukraine and seek to “destabilize the socio-political situation in Russia” in a video address published on the Kremlin’s website on Dec. 20.
Putin has long accused Ukraine of being guided by foreign powers, especially the U.S., and has claimed that its actions are dictated by Washington.
While the U.S. openly supports Ukraine and provides the country with funding, weapons, and strategic military assistance, there is no evidence that U.S. intelligence services actively assist Ukraine on the ground, especially within Russia.
The comments came on Russia’s Security Officer’s Day. Putin congratulated them for their work, particularly in parts of Ukraine that Russia illegally annexed in 2022.
He also accused Ukraine of pursuing “state terrorism” by engaging in sabotage and targeted assassinations. He did not elaborate on the statement.
Ukraine occasionally acknowledges its involvement in various operations within Russia, although it does not take direct responsibility.
Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) published a video on Nov. 30 saying that trains in the region around Moscow were disrupted at the end of November “as a result of a special measure implemented together with the resistance movement.”
A pro-Russian former lawmaker, Illia Kyva, who was charged with treason in Ukraine, was assassinated in Moscow Oblast on Dec. 6. in a special operation conducted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), according to the Kyiv Independent’s source in law enforcement.
Russian intelligence is widely believed to be behind a significant number of operations in foreign countries to sow chaos and destabilize society.
Russian operatives have also assassinated perceived opponents of Putin’s regime in foreign countries, such as the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the U.K. Skripal and his daughter survived the attack, but an innocent passerby who found the poison was killed.
More Than Half of Children Losing Medicaid Coverage Live in Just 5 States
Michael Rainey – December 19, 2023
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As individual states continue to disenroll millions of people from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) now that pandemic-era suspension of participation guidelines has come to an end, new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that more than 50% of the children who have lost health coverage this year come from just five states.
From March 2023, when the disenrollment process began, to the end of September, 2.2 million children were removed from Medicaid and CHIP, two programs that overlap and are typically lumped together. The five states with the largest total declines in enrollment – Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Arkansas – accounted for 54% of the reductions, or more than 1.2 million children.
All five states are led by Republicans, and the first three have refused to expand their Medicaid systems as allowed by the Affordable Care Act. In terms of total disenrollment, the 10 states that have refused Medicaid expansion – Texas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin and Wyoming – have removed more children from coverage than all of the expansion states combined, HHS said.
Echoing the worries of many healthcare experts, the Biden administration has expressed concerns that some states have been too aggressive in removing beneficiaries from their Medicaid and CHIP rolls, with many people losing coverage simply because they failed to complete various kinds of paperwork. HHS said Monday that Secretary Xavier Becerra has sent letters to the nine states with the highest disenrollment rates urging them to “adopt additional federal strategies and flexibilities to help prevent children and their families from losing coverage due to red tape.”
Among other things, Becerra called on governors to remove barriers to participation such as CHIP enrollment fees and premiums; to make it easier to automatically renew children for coverage; to expand efforts to contact families facing renewal; and to expand their Medicaid programs so that children do not fall into a coverage gap. “I urge you to ensure that no eligible child in your state loses their health insurance due to ‘red tape’ or other bureaucratic barriers during the Medicaid enrollment process,” he wrote.
Liz Cheney Tells Fox News Viewers Why They Should Not Vote For Donald Trump: “This Isn’t About Policy … It’s About The Republic. It’s About The Constitution”
Ted Johnson – December 18, 2023
Liz Cheney, in a sometimes contentious interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, at one point addressed the network’s viewers with a message: Don’t vote for Donald Trump.
“We can have conservative policies without having to torch the Constitution,” Cheney said. “And so what I would urge people watching today who are going to be voting in those caucuses and in those primaries, vote for somebody else. Do not vote for somebody who already tried to seize power.”
Now an outcast from the Republican party for her criticism of Trump and her warnings about giving him a second term, Cheney has made numerous appearances across other media outlets as she promotes her book, Oath and Honor. Her first big sitdown was with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and there was some question as to whether she would appear on Fox News at all. On CNBC, Cheney criticized Fox News host Sean Hannity for “enabling” Trump.
On Special Report on Monday, Baier told her, “We have a policy here to hear from all sides, and we wanted to invite you to talk about your book.”
The interview, which ran just short of 10 minutes, did not start with Cheney’s book but with Baier’s question about how she views President Joe Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. “I’m worried that they’re getting to abandon Israel, and I think we’re in a situation where Hamas must be destroyed,” Cheney said, offering some criticism of the administration.
But that fed into a point she made several times throughout the interview: Her opposition to Trump is not about policy, but of his efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election, including his conduct on January 6, 2021, along with what he has vowed to do in a second term.
“He tells us every day,” she said. “If you look at the steps he would have to take in terms of simply refusing to enforce court orders, or comply with court orders with which he disagrees, putting people in key positions …. unethical lawyers who would help him, frankly, blow through many of the guardrails in our Constitution. I think it is a very real concern.”
Then Baier read from a Wall Street Journal op ed from last week in which the writer, Allysia Finley, called the notion of “Trump as dictator” a “classic case of projection.” Finley went on to claim that it is Biden who has abused executive power, ignored the law and “run roughshod over individual liberties,” while Trump “would have to contend with a hostile media and a federal bureaucracy that would be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at every step.”
“Well, I think they’re wrong,” Cheney told Baier. “We would not have to guess about what the next President Trump would do because he did it before. He would not have around him the people that were around him, frankly, the people that the country will hear from as his trial moves forward, who were all his appointees…people that told him on January 6th, as you and I were talking that day, actually, that he needed to tell the mob to go home.”
Baier, though, stuck with the op ed, contending that Cheney has not been vocal about Biden’s executive orders to cancel student loans, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines. For a time, he and Cheney talked over one another.
Cheney said that she didn’t think it was true that she had not weighed in on some of the topics, before making the point that Trump’s case was different. She even cited Baier’s own book on George Washington.
“The last chapter of your book is called “The Gift of a Peaceful Transition of Power.” That is what we are talking about,” she said.
“This is not about me,” Baier said.
“That’s right. But that’s a very important concept….Every single president, Republican and Democrat, since George Washington, has ensured the peaceful transition of power. Donald Trump tried to seize power.”
“This isn’t about policy. I voted with Donald Trump 93% of the time. This is about the nation. It’s about the republic. It’s about the Constitution.”
Cheney, who was once a Fox News contributor, also seemed to be making an appeal to the Fox News workforce, invoking one of its late conservative commentators. “I come here to Fox, and I sit in the Charles Krauthammer green room, and I know how much, how revered Charles was, by you, by me,” she said. “And Charles taught us a whole bunch of things. But one of them is that some things have to matter, and rising above politics, rising about partisanship, recognizing our duty to the Constitution, is the most conservative of all conservative principles.”
Trump would install loyalists to reshape U.S. foreign policy. Diplomats gird for “doomsday”
Gram Slattery, Simon Lewis, Idrees Ali, Phil Stewart – December 18, 2023
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Trump campaigns in Reno
WASHINGTON (Reuters) –Donald Trump in a second term would likely install loyalists in key positions in the Pentagon, State Department and CIA whose primary allegiance would be to him, allowing him more freedom than in his first presidency to enact isolationist policies and whims, nearly 20 current and former aides and diplomats said.
The result would enable Trump to make sweeping changes to the U.S. stance on issues ranging from the Ukraine war to trade with China, as well as to the federal institutions that implement – and sometimes constrain – foreign policy, the aides and diplomats said.
During his 2017-2021 term, Trump struggled to impose his sometimes impulsive and erratic vision on the U.S. national security establishment.
He often voiced frustration at top officials who slow-walked, shelved, or talked him out of some of his schemes. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in his memoir that he twice raised objections to Trump’s suggestion of missile strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, the U.S.’s biggest trade partner. The former president has not commented.
“President Trump came to realize that personnel is policy,” said Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and final national security adviser. “At the outset of his administration, there were a lot of people that were interested in implementing their own policies, not the president’s policies.”
Having more loyalists in place would allow Trump to advance his foreign policy priorities faster and more efficiently than he was able to when previously in office, the current and former aides said.
Among his proposals on the campaign trail this year, Trump has said he would deploy U.S. Special Forces against the Mexican cartels – something unlikely to get the blessing of the Mexican government.
If he returns to power again, Trump would waste little time cutting defense aid to Europe and further shrinking economic ties with China, the aides said.
O’Brien, who remains one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers and speaks to him regularly, said imposing trade tariffs on NATO countries if they did not meet their commitments to spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense would likely be among the policies on the table during a second Trump term.
The Trump campaign declined to comment for this article.
Unlike in the lead-up to his 2016 election, Trump has cultivated a stable of people with whom he speaks regularly, and who have significant foreign policy experience and his personal trust, according to four people who converse with him.
Those advisers include John Ratcliffe, Trump’s last Director of National Intelligence, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, and Kash Patel, a former Trump staffer who held several positions in the intelligence and defense communities.
None of those people responded to interview requests.
While the specific policies of these informal advisers vary to some degree, most have been vocal defenders of Trump since he left office and have expressed concerns that America is paying too much to support both NATO and Ukraine.
“DOOMSDAY OPTION”
Trump has a commanding lead in the Republican presidential nomination race. If he becomes the Republican nominee and then defeats Democratic President Joe Biden next November, the world will likely see a much more emboldened Trump, more knowledgeable about how to wield power, both at home and abroad, the current and former aides said.
That prospect has foreign capitals scrambling for information on how a second Trump term would look. Trump himself has offered few clues about what kind of foreign policy he would pursue next time around, beyond broad claims like ending the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
Eight European diplomats interviewed by Reuters said there were doubts about whether Trump would honor Washington’s commitment to defend NATO allies and acute fears he would cut off aid to Ukraine amid its war with Russia.
One Northern European diplomat in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said he and his colleagues had kept talking to Trump aides even after the former president left the White House in 2021.
“The story from there was, ‘We were not prepared (to govern), and next time it has to be different,'” the diplomat said. “When they got into the Oval Office in 2017, they didn’t have any idea what the hell to do with it. But this won’t happen again.”
The diplomat, whose country is a NATO member, and one other diplomat in Washington said their missions have outlined in diplomatic cables to their home capitals a possible “doomsday option.”
In that hypothetical scenario, one of multiple post-election hypotheses these diplomats say they have described in cables, Trump makes good on pledges to dismantle elements of the bureaucracy and pursue political enemies to such a degree that America’s system of checks and balances is weakened.
“You have to explain to your capital. ‘Things might go rather well: the US keeps on rehabilitating herself’ (if Biden is re-elected),” said the diplomat, describing his mission’s view of American politics. “Then you have Trump, a mild version: a repetition of his first term with some aggressive overtones. And then you have the doomsday option.”
RETREAT FROM GLOBALISM
Michael Mulroy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under Trump, said the former president would likely appoint individuals who subscribed to his isolationist brand of foreign policy and were unlikely to confront him.
All U.S. presidents have the power to name political appointees to the most senior jobs in the federal bureaucracy, including the State Department, Pentagon and the CIA.
“I think it will be based primarily on loyalty to President Trump,” Mulroy said, “a firm belief in the kind of foreign policy that he believes in, which is much more focused on the United States, much less on a kind of globalist (policy).”
Trump clashed with his own appointees at the Pentagon on a number of issues in his first term, from a ban on transgender service members that he supported to his 2018 decision to pull U.S. troops from Syria.
When his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, resigned in 2018, the former four-star general stated he had significant policy differences with Trump. While Mattis did not explicitly lay them out, he stressed in his resignation letter the need to maintain an ironclad bond with NATO and other allies, while keeping enemies, like Russia, at arms-length.
Ed McMullen, Trump’s former ambassador to Switzerland and now a campaign fund-raiser who is in contact with the former president, stressed that most foreign service personnel he knew served the president faithfully.
But, he said, Trump was aware of the need to avoid choosing disloyal or disobedient officials for top foreign policy posts in a second term.
“The president is very conscious that competency and loyalty are critical to the success of the (next) administration,” he said.
Outside of Trump’s top circle of advisers, a potential Trump administration plans to root out actors at lower levels of the national security community perceived to be “rogue,” according to Agenda47, his campaign’s official policy site.
Such a step would have little precedent in the United States, which has a non-partisan bureaucracy that serves whichever administration is in office.
Trump has said he plans to reinstate an executive order he issued in the final months of his first term, which was never fully implemented, that would allow him to more easily dismiss civil servants.
In a little-reported document published on Agenda47 earlier this year, Trump said he would establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which would, among other functions, publish documents related to “Deep State” abuses of power. He would also create a separate “auditing” body meant to monitor intelligence gathering in real time.
“The State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Establishment will be a very different place by the end of my administration,” Trump said in a policy video earlier this year.
NATO PULLOUT? NEW TRADE WAR
During a second term, Trump has pledged to end China’s most favored trading nation status – a standing that generally lowers trade barriers between countries – and to push Europeans to increase their defense spending.
Whether Trump will continue vital U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia is of particular importance to European diplomats in Washington trying to prepare, as is his continued commitment to NATO.
“There are rumors that he wants to take the US away from NATO or withdraw from Europe, of course it sounds worrying but … we are not in a panic,” said a diplomat from one Baltic state.
Despite worries about the future of NATO, several diplomats interviewed for this article said pressure from Trump during his first term did lead to increased defense spending.
John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who has since become a vocal critic of the former president, told Reuters he believed Trump would withdraw from NATO.
Such a decision would be earth-shaking for European nations that have depended on the alliance’s collective security guarantee for nearly 75 years.
Three other former Trump administration officials, two of whom are still in contact with him, played down that possibility, with one saying it would likely not be worth the domestic political blowback.
At least one diplomat in Washington, Finnish Ambassador Mikko Hautala, has spoken to Trump directly more than once, according to two people with knowledge of the interactions, which were first reported by The New York Times.
Those discussions centered on the NATO accession process for Finland. Hautala wanted to make sure Trump had accurate information about what Finland brings to the alliance and how Finland joining benefits the U.S., one of the people said.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery, Simon Lewis, Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay, Arshad Mohammed and Steve Holland; editing by Ross Colvin, Don Durfee and Daniel Flynn)
