Democrats In Congress Have Options To Punish Trump For Illegal IG Firings
If Democrats in Congress want to show Trump that there will be consequences for his illegal firing of nearly 20 IGs there are steps that they can take.
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Trump Broke The Law, And Republicans Shrug
The biggest problem facing the country isn’t necessarily that Donald Trump returned to the White House. It is a huge problem that Trump is back and this time he has brought with him the ideologues from The Heritage Foundation who have an organized far-right agenda.
Let’s not diminish the situation in the White House, but the accelerant to Trump is that there is no majority accountability that can come from Congress. Republicans having control over the entire federal government means that when Trump takes official actions that are in direct violation of the law, Republicans are free to say, like Sen. Lindsey Graham did on Sunday, that they aren’t losing sleep over it.
Well, that’s the end of that, right?
Republicans have the majority, so Democrats have to sit back and let Trump run wild in his lawlessness.
Not exactly.
Democrats may not have a majority in the House, but the Republican majority is the smallest in history, and in the Senate, Democrats all have votes on Trump’s nominees.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) laid out some of what Democrats could do:
There's a lot that we can do. And I have to say, as someone who introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which was designed in part to protect inspector generals, to write-off this clear violation of law by saying, "Well, technically he broke the law," yeah, he broke the law.
And not just any law, but a law meant to crowd out waste, fraud, and abuse. And yeah, the remedies Congress has. We have the power of the purse, we have the power right now to confirm or not confirm people for Cabinet positions that control agencies, or would control agencies whose inspector generals have just been fired.
And let's remember, in his first term he fired an inspector general for providing whistleblower complaints to Congress, fired an inspector general for saying the pandemic response, his response, had flaws. The American people, if we don't have good and independent inspector generals are going to see the swamp refill. They're going to see rampant waste, fraud. They're going to see corruption. It may be the president's goal here when he's got a meme coin that's making him billions, is to remove anyone that's going to call the public attention to his malfeasance.
Video:
The Power Of The Purse
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