Trump Could Change Policies To Please Voters - But He'd Rather Cheat

The following is part of a post by Dan Rather and his staff: 

Donald Trump knows his party will probably lose one, if not both, houses of Congress in November. He could do something politically rational to help his cause, such as removing the remaining 2,300 ICE agents from the streets of Minneapolis, or lifting tariffs, or restoring Obamacare subsidies to lower health insurance costs.

Since his is very much a “me” not a “we” presidency, none of that will happen. Making the lives of the American people better doesn’t seem to be in his wheelhouse. . . .

Trump has known for some time that Republican prospects for the midterms are bleak. He also knows his unceasing and erroneous refrain that American elections are rigged and hordes of undocumented immigrants vote illegally are tired, old lies.

In July, he demanded that Texas undergo an unorthodox, mid-decade redistricting that could net five Republican House seats in November. California countered with a redistricting plan of its own, which was upheld by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, only adding to the president’s alarm. He has tried to strong-arm a number of other states into partisan gerrymandering, with less success.

So, if he can’t gain enough seats by redrawing congressional maps and disenfranchising millions of people, how about trashing the Constitution? On Monday, Trump told Dan Bongino, current podcaster and former FBI deputy director, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” . . .

If federalizing the election process won’t work, Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, has another plan. He is setting the stage for chaos and intimidation on Election Day. On Tuesday, he announced, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Trump has also toyed with the idea of calling off the midterms, which he can’t do legally. But he can use ICE to block and deter voters. And he could use the Department of Justice to seize ballots and take over vote counting. He has also threatened to decertify voting machines. None of these moves would be justified, but lack of justification has never stopped him.

Last week, the FBI seized Fulton County, Georgia’s 2020 election ballots. Fulton County includes Atlanta. In 2020, Trump lost Georgia, even after two recounts. He then tried to lean on the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the election. So why seize these documents now?

Since nothing can or should be done about the 2020 results, the only reason for this unprecedented action now is to set the stage for 2026.

The DOJ has demanded unredacted voter files from all 50 states. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have not complied. No surprise, Trump & Co. are suing them. 

Like most of their suits, it isn’t going well. On January 15, a U.S. district court found that the Justice Department’s demands for states’ voter data violated federal privacy laws.

Voter files are a critical weapon for voter suppression and election subversion. They can be used to purge voters. As we know, the DOJ doesn’t need a valid reason to do such a thing. . . .

Anyone who really cares about the country should be paying close attention. November’s midterm elections are shaping up to be a fight not just at the ballot box, but for democracy itself.

Trump Prefers Cheating Over Free And Fair Elections

The following post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: 

Texas wasn’t always the bastion of right-wing extremism it seems today. Remember Ann Richards? She was the progressive firebrand governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995. I recall her keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when she said of then-President George H.W. Bush, “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” 

Today, the progressive torch is being carried in Texas by people like Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Greg Casar (from Texas’s 35th congressional district), and State Rep. Nicole Collier.

Earlier this week, Collier remained in the Texas House chamber overnight to protest a Republican-imposed requirement that Democrats agree to a mandatory police escort to leave the Capitol after a redistricting walkout. She viewed the requirement as restriction on her constitutional rights.

Collier was right, of course. Texas Republicans are treating Texas Democrats as if they’re sworn enemies. Trump has stoked this by telling Texas Governor Greg Abbott to find five additional Republican congressional seats by gerrymandering the state even more wildly than it was already gerrymandered. 

On Wednesday, the newly redrawn map finally passed. 

Trump is putting pressure on other red states to do the same. It’s all part of Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress in the 2026 midterms.

The stakes are huge. Republicans could easily lose their current seven-vote majority in the House, or possibly their six-vote majority in the Senate. 

Hopefully, blue state governors and legislatures — starting with Gavin Newsom’s California — will stop this assault on voting rights by credibly threatening to gerrymander an equal number of additional Democratic congressional seats. 

With blue states mobilized, it wouldn’t be a race to the bottom. It would be a race to save democracy by removing any incentive for red states to try to gerrymander their way to more Republican seats. 

Two other parts to Trump’s plot to keep Republicans in control of Congress are also coming into view.

He’s attacking mail-in ballots. As he wrote on Monday in a social media post, he intends to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”

He also intends to target what he says are “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

Can anyone doubt what Trump is trying to do?

Asked about his effort to end mail-in voting and rid the election process of voting machines, he told reporters, “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt.” 

The third part of Trump’s plot is to occupy major cities, mostly led by Democratic mayors, which are centers of Democratic voting. He probably figures that militarizing these cities will intimidate voters to stay away from the polls. 

He’s doing a trial run now in his occupation of Washington, D.C. — deploying ICE agents, National Guard troops, and the Army. To justify it, he charged that: "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”

Rubbish. According to the Justice Department’s own data (which, of course, Trump rejects), violent crime in the city hit a 30-year low last year. City data shows homicides are down by more than 10%, robbery down by almost 30%, and carjackings down nearly 40%.

Let’s be clear about what’s going on here. 

The man who instituted a coup against the United States when he failed to win the 2020 presidential elections — demanding that Republican governors “give” him the votes he needed, instructing his vice president not certify the election, and encouraging a mob to attack the Capitol — does not want free and fair elections in 2026 or beyond. 

That’s why the rest of us — Democrats, independents, and Republicans who still believe in democracy — must organize a counter-offensive, now.

Part of that counter-offensive begins with Gavin Newsom’s California; other blue states must join in. Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots and voting machines, and his occupation of our cities, should be challenged in the federal courts. A wide coalition of state and city officials should participate. 

The rest of us must make good trouble by ensuring that Trump’s plot is widely known, and that we will resist it.

Republicans Are NOT Fiscally Responsible - And They're Trying To Hide That

Catherine Rampell (The Washington Post) explains the nasty trick Republicans want to use to hide the cost of their tax cuts for the rich: 

Senate Republicans on Wednesday decided their party alone will control how math works. This is a pressing legislative question at present, because pretzeling budgetary outcomes into prettier shapes and sizes will determine whether Republicans can pass President Donald Trump’s promised tax cuts.

Those cuts are very expensive. They include not only extensions of the 2017 tax law provisions (set to expire this year), but they also lower corporate rates as well as carveouts for tips, auto loan payments and other goodies. In total, Trump’s preferred tax agenda could cost between $5 trillion and $11 trillion over the next decade.

This is inconvenient. Republicans like to pretend they’re fiscal conservatives (at least some of the time). They would prefer not to acknowledge the hefty price tag, and they also don’t want to fully offset it with unpopular spending cuts.

So, they’ve devised a cheat. Rather than admitting how much their tax agenda would cost, they are simply asserting that they get their first $4 trillion — free!

Here’s how: Republicans say that because some (expiring) tax cuts have been in place since 2017, extending them shouldn’t be recorded as costing anything, because they wouldn’t feel different. This is ... not how budgets work. As I’ve explained before, it’s like saying even though your car lease has ended, leasing another car should count as “free” because you got used to the convenience of having a vehicle around.

Normally, neutral referees are available to call out this kind of funny business.

First, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office “scores” significant legislation, to determine how much a bill would change revenue and spending in the years ahead, compared with what would happen if Congress allowed existing law to remain as it is. Then, a person called the Senate parliamentarian would confirm that the CBO number matches what lawmakers had previously agreed their bill would cost. If it doesn’t, the bill becomes much harder to pass.

Republicans have been trying to persuade the Senate parliamentarian to adopt their preferred math. So far, the parliamentarian has delayed making a ruling. But on Wednesday, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) announced the parliamentarian won’t ever need to decide. He plans to do what the party wants either way.

“I have the authority to determine baseline numbers for spending and revenue,” Graham said in a statement. Under that authority, he said, he can use the special book-cooking math — a “current policy baseline” — that grants his party $4 trillion in freebies.

In other words: 2+2=5, if Republicans decree it so.

The GOP Would Rather Cheat Than Modify Its Agenda

When a political party finds most voters opposed to its agenda, it has two ways to legitimately respond. It can convince those voters they are wrong  or it can modify its agenda. The Republican Party finds itself in that dilemma. But they have chosen a third way - an undemocratic one.

Jamelle Bouie explains the GOP way in this part of his New York Times article:

Republicans have made “democracy” a dirty word. And they seem to have given up on persuasion in favor of trying to win power through the brute-force exploitation of the political system. Why win over voters when you can gerrymander your party into a permanent legislative majority? Why try to persuade voters to reject a referendum you disagree with when you can try instead to change the rules and kill the referendum before it can get on the ballot? Why aim to win a broad national majority when you can win — or try to snatch — a narrow victory in the swing states?

The defining attribute of the modern Republican Party, beyond its devotion to Donald Trump, is a profound lack of confidence in its ability to compete for a majority of the country at large married to an inability to see outside its ideological cocoon. Republicans both reject the idea that voters could have a legitimate dispute with their views and do not seem to believe that they could persuade anyone who disagrees. And so they decide that the public in question has been indoctrinated or brainwashed or led astray, in one way or another, from the supposedly pure light of the Republican Party.

But the truth is so much simpler. Republicans have tied themselves to the far extremes of the conservative movement — and most voters just don’t like it.

House GOP: No Help For Israel Unless Tax Cheats Protected

Paul Krugman (in The New York Times) exposes the "Big Grift" House Republicans are trying to pull off:

Historians of propaganda are familiar with the concept of the Big Lie, a claim so extreme that many people end up accepting it because they can’t believe that authority figures would make up something so at odds with reality.

It often seems to me that we need a term to describe a somewhat similar phenomenon in policy debates, which we might call the Big Grift. What I mean are policy proposals so corrupt, so obviously designed to benefit an undeserving few at everyone else’s expense, that many voters balk at the notion that seemingly respectable politicians actually advocate such things.

A case in point is the current demand by House Republicans that funding for Israel in this moment of crisis be tied to budget cutsthat would undermine the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. This should be a major scandal, but my suspicion is that many voters just won’t accept the idea that G.O.P. leaders would do something so cartoonishly villainous. . . .

I mean, holding national security hostage unless we make it easier for wealthy tax cheats to break the law? Who would do that?

Yet I fear that the proposal’s very awfulness may protect it from scrutiny, because voters will be incredulous about claims that this idea is even on the table.

Still, I guess we do need to discuss the substance of the proposal, on the off chance that somebody might be paying attention.

First, the idea that cutting the I.R.S. budget would somehow help pay for aid to Israel is utterly wrong. America has a huge “tax gap” — taxes legally owed but not paid. The bulk of that tax gapprobably comes from wealthy Americans underreporting their incomes, which they can get away with because the I.R.S. lacks the resources to fully enforce the law.

As a result, cutting I.R.S. funding would actually increase the deficit by enabling more tax evasion, a conclusion confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday in its score of the House proposal.

Republicans, however, often claim that tax cuts do great things for the economy, and maybe even pay for themselves. There’s not a shred of evidence for that belief. Still, starving the I.R.S. of funds is in a way a kind of tax cut. So can’t they make a similar argument here?

No, for several reasons.

For one thing, even if you believe (wrongly) that low taxes on the rich strongly encourage entrepreneurship or something, making it easier for a businessman to cheat on his taxes probably doesn’t have the same incentive effects as reducing his legal tax rate.

Furthermore, enabling tax evasion doesn’t help all businesses equally; it biases the economy toward activities, often unproductive, where tax fraud is relatively easy, such as real estate speculation. Did I mention that the Trump Organization has been convicted of tax fraud?

And making it easier to cheat on taxes by defunding the tax police probably has spillover effects that go beyond the direct adverse effect on enforcement. The more we become a society that rewards people who evade their fiscal obligations, the more likely it is that people who don’t cheat on their taxes will feel like chumps and losers. If Americans start to believe, as Leona Helmsley put it, that “only the little people pay taxes,” the damage to our society will surely be moral as well as fiscal.

Yet starving the I.R.S. has long been a Republican priority; what’s new is the party’s willingness to serve that priority by endangering national security.

Where does this priority come from? I don’t pretend to have a full answer. I will note, however, that, as the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there has long been a close association between right-wing conspiracy theorizing and financial grifting. Alex Jones, the proprietor of the conspiracy site Infowars, best known for claiming that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook was a left-wing hoax, made his money by selling bogus dietary supplements — what my colleague Farhad Manjoo calls the “wellness-conspiracy industrial complex.”

And now that conspiracy theorists have effectively taken over the G.O.P., it kind of makes sense that one of their overriding policy priorities is to deprive the government of the resources it needs to crack down on grifters and financial fraud.

In any case, don’t be skeptical about news reports that Republicans are willing to sacrifice crucial national interests unless we make life easier for tax cheats. That is, in fact, exactly what is happening. 

Trump Threatens Election Process But Is Powerless To Do it

Donald Trump is trailing in the presidential election, and has been for months. He has tried everything he knows to change that (bullying, lying, name-calling, etc.), but nothing has worked. Now he is trying to cheat.

He wants to outlaw mail-in ballots, and if he can't do that, will claim the election was fraudulent. He has even suggested that he would refuse to peacefully transfer power if he loses the vote, and has suggested that GOP state legislatures ignore the wishes of voters in their state and pick a slate of Trump electoral college voters.

He has one problem. It's all bluster, because he doesn't have to power to alter voting (which is run by the separate states) or change electoral college slates (which are set by state law).

Here's part of what Teri Kanefield has to say about Trump's efforts in The Washington Post:

If you are Donald Trump, and your image is based on the claim that you are a winner, what do you do when every recent national poll has you losing and you’re heading for a likely electoral defeat? How do you energize your base and get them excited about voting if the media narrative is that you are losing? How do you stop people from talking about your failed pandemic policies, tapes showing that you lied to the American people, an economy in trouble and polls showing the Republicans are likely to lose their Senate majority?

You create a fiction: You tell the world that you are not losing, and that you have no intention of being defeated.

And so, on Wednesday, when a journalist asked President Trump if he would commit to making sure there’s a peaceful transfer of power after the election, Trump responded by saying, “We're going to have to see what happens. As you know I’ve been complaining about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster.” (The ballots are not, in fact, a “disaster.”) He went on to say: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, there will be a continuation.” Not surprisingly, the spectacle of the U.S. president announcing to the world that he plans to get rid of ballots so that there won’t be a transfer of power triggered massive outrage.

But Trump doesn’t have the power to get rid of the ballots. Trump doesn’t control state elections. While he can certainly try to bring legal challenges, those challenges would need a legal basis. He probably won’t succeed in trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden if he loses. Trump is still doing what he always does: attempting to make his imaginary world — where he’s all-powerful and could only lose if his opponents cheat — into reality, in hopes of rallying his voters and panicking the rest of us.

The Trump campaign is already musing about finding ways for the president to steal the election. An anonymous legal adviser to Trump’s camp told the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman that Republican-controlled state legislatures are contemplating sending Trump-supporting slates of electors in for the electoral college vote count, even if Biden wins their states.

That isn’t as easy as it might sound. While the Constitution gives states the authority to allocate their electoral votes as they wish, every state has laws giving that power to the voters. For that matter, each state has laws for how their elections will be monitored and certified, and how the electoral votes will be cast. The legislature cannot suddenly reallocate that power without amending their laws. If they want to amend the laws, they have to follow their states’ procedures — which includes the possibility that governors could veto such legislation, which would certainly happen in a state such as Pennsylvania, which has a Republican legislature and a Democratic governor. Republicans there don’t have enough statehouse votes to override a veto. Similar problems would arise in other states. . . .

But Trump’s campaign wants Americans to think that Trump can, with the snap of his fingers, order state legislatures to defy their own laws — and that they’ll do it. . . .

Thus Trump creates a fantasy world in which he is an unstoppable winner, and his critics inadvertently lend credence to the fantasy by acting as if it is true.

This is not to say Trump is not dangerous. He is. This is not to say Trump would not willingly lie, cheat, steal, and even let more than 200,000 Americans die if he thought it would get him reelected. He would.

But he does not control elections in 50 states and the District of Columbia. He cannot get rid of ballots. He does not decide who won the election. He does not choose when he leaves the White House. And on top of that, he loses constantly. Did Mexico ever build that wall? Did Democrats not win the 2018 elections? If Trump could fix elections, Nancy Pelosi would not be speaker of the House. In Wisconsin’s special election just this past April, Trump threw his support behind Dan Kelly while the GOP did all it could to suppress the Democratic vote. Kelly still lost.

If we play into Trump’s hands and act as if he has the power to throw out votes and declare himself the winner of the election, we help give credence to the lie that he is all-powerful, and thus help create a reality based on Trump’s wishful thinking. The way to keep his fantasy from coming true is to avoid panicking and contributing to the hysteria — and to vote him out.

GOP Guts The IRS To Help The Rich Get Even More

(Cartoon image is by Arend van Dam at cagle.com.)

If there's one thing the Republicans want to do, it's make rich people even richer. About a year ago, they gave the rich huge tax cuts, while giving other Americans next to nothing. That would have been bad enough, but it's not all they did to advantage the rich. They have also gutted the IRS by drastically cutting its funding, making it much easier for the rich to cheat on their taxes.

Here's how the editorial board of The New York Times puts it:

Let’s take a moment to pity the Internal Revenue Service. Yes, to many Americans, it’s a money-grabbing ogre siphoning hard-earned cash to the faceless federal bureaucracy.

But the nation’s tax collector today is an enfeebled enforcer. Its budget has been bled dry by a Republican Congress in service to wealthy donors and businesses aggressively pursuing tax avoidance, leaving uncollected 18 percent to 20 percent of potential tax revenues annually. That’s the conclusion in articles by the journalism site ProPublica, co-published by The Atlantic and The Times.

Loopholes are beyond the means of most Americans who earn salaries or are paid hourly wages, and are exploited by those who derive significant income from investments or business revenue. Although we’d all like to pay less, relative to most developed nations our tax burden is a pretty good deal.

It’s an even better deal for the richest Americans, who have benefited the most from President Trump’s tax cuts. The rich are different: They’re more likely to cheat, according to one study of I.R.S. data. And the I.R.S. has about as many auditors now as it did 60 years ago, when there were half as many Americans. The undermining of the I.R.S.’s enforcement capability coincides nicely with the Republican playbook: Enrich wealthy individuals and corporations with tax giveaways that balloon the deficit, justifying spending cuts for health care, education and infrastructure, then amplify the process by not holding high-end taxpayers accountable for the amounts they owe.

Dodging taxes is as old as taxes themselves. Just ask Mr. Trump, who has employed systematic dodging for decades, according to a Times investigation. 

We got a good look at one of the bigger problems, the proclivity of the wealthy to hide cash from the I.R.S., in 2008, when the Justice Department was able to pierce the Swiss bank secrecy veil during an investigation of UBS. The department uncovered thousands of rich Americans who were hiding about $18 billion in offshore accounts arranged by that Swiss bank. Many were compelled to fess up and pay up. But eight years later, the Panama Papers, millions of files hacked from a Panamanian law firm that specialized in caching money for the rich and powerful, disclosed that there were still plenty of rich people willing to play hide-and-seek with the I.R.S.

The odds are in their favor, and growing. ProPublica reported that I.R.S. audits dropped 42 percent from 2010 to 2017, a period in which the I.R.S. budget was lopped by $2.5 billion, adjusted for inflation. New investigations of people who don’t file dropped to 362,000 last year, from 2.4 million in 2011. That costs the Treasury $3 billion annually in uncollected taxes. More than $8 billion in back taxes did not get collected in 2017 because the agency couldn’t get to them before the 10-year statute of limitations ran out, another worsening problem. Tax delinquents can simply wait the agency out. ProPublica estimated the total shortfall of uncollected funds since 2011 at $95 billion.

These uncollected billions could pay for any number of things: better care of wounded veterans, infrastructure improvements such as a desperately needed new tunnel between New York and New Jersey. You could even build an expensive wall.

One area where the I.R.S. still bares its teeth is in auditing people in the lowest tax bracket. If you are claiming the earned-income tax credit, which provides cash for people who typically earn less than $20,000 annually, you are as likely to be audited as someone earning between $500,000 and $1 million. ProPublica reported that 36 percent of all I.R.S. audits focused on this group. It may not be a crime to be poor in the G.O.P.’s America, but you can expect to be treated like a criminal for accepting the government’s cash to make ends meet. At best, that’s an inefficient use of I.R.S. agents: Compliance should apply to all, but the I.R.S. should do most of its fishing where the big fish are.

The Trump/G.O.P. tax policy is now operating at peak failure. The tax cuts have failed to increase gross domestic product beyond the “sugar high” stimulus they gave to an economy already heading toward record low unemployment. The economy seems to be slowing, making a mockery of the promise of strong growth that was used to peddle the tax cuts. 

The stock market is shuddering at the idea of a slowdown, which corporations contributed to by using their tax windfall to buy back more than $1 trillion of their own stock. They have, to this point, immolated capital instead of using it for additional hiring, increased wages or further business investments.

A CNBC poll found that millionaires are still sanguine about the economy. They can well afford to be. If their stocks lose value, they can take a write-off. If stocks rise, their maximum long-term capital gains tax is only 20 percent. Most American households don’t own stocks — or no longer own them, having been forced to liquidate stock holdings in the Great Recession, which was precipitated by a collapse in the housing market. Thus the wealth gap grows, reaching levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties.

To pay for the millionaire tax cuts, sacrifices had to be made. So Congress limited deductions for state and local taxes to $10,000 annually. While that generally applies to well-to-do people who can itemize their tax returns, it was also a clear shot against blue states such as California and New York that have relatively high state and local taxes. But reducing these deductions, along with higher interest rates, punished the housing market, which is stagnant nationally and in a free fall in the Northeast.

Our ability to keep the $1 trillion deficit created by the Trump tax cuts from deepening depends in part on collecting taxes to which the government is legally entitled. 

Think of it this way: To protect our nation, we have the most powerful army in the world. To protect our tax base, we have an army on the order of Liechtenstein’s. 

The lack of deterrence will only encourage more cheating. The I.R.S. needs to be capable of doing the job for which it was created — from answering taxpayers’ questions to chasing down the richest cheats, even if they occupy the Oval Office.