Trump Administration Most Corrupt in a Century

Even putting aside the numerous corrupt and criminal actions by the current occupant of the White House such as obstruction of justice as documented in the Mueller report and violations of the emoluments clause by receiving large amounts of money from various foreign countries and businesses through his hotels the Trump administration is without a doubt the most thoroughly corrupt since at least Warren G. Harding was president from 1921-1923.

Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price was run out of the administration for using tax payer funds to pay for charter flights to various speaking engagements but wasn’t prosecuted. Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin got a slap on the wrist for doing the same thing to the tune of over $800,000 and is still a Cabinet member. Former Texas governor and now Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, has been investigated for using $56,000 in taxpayer money to pay for charter flights that could have been made on scheduled airlines for far less.

Before resigning in December, Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke was being investigated for possible self-dealing involving a developer working on a project near land in Montana owned by Zinke and his wife, Lola. The question is whether Zinke used his office for financial benefit; the Interior Department’s inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department. He also spent thousands of dollars of public money on charter flights that he could have made on regularly scheduled airlines for a few hundred dollars. In addition friends and campaign contributors of Zinke were awarded a $300 million dollar contract to rebuild the power grid in Puerto Rico even though their company consists of only two people and the company has no experience with such a large scale project.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt was under investigation by the inspector general of his agency prior to his resignation. The inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency said that former Administrator Scott Pruitt wasted nearly $124,000 of taxpayer money on excessive travel, including first-class airline tickets. Pruitt had EPA staff help his wife, Marilyn, seek employment with an annual salary of more than $200,000. Just three months after Pruitt was sworn in as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Pruitt used agency staff to contact Chick-Fil-A about his wife becoming a franchisee. Pruitt paid just $50 a night to stay in a Capitol Hill condominium linked to a prominent Washington lobbyist whose firm represents a long list of fossil fuel companies like Exxon.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spent about $45,000 refitting his office, including $4,000 for new blinds, more than $8,000 for a dishwasher, and nearly $32,000 for a dining-room table. In March 2018, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the spending. While the blinds were found to be acceptable the table and dishwasher broke the law.

In February, the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) refused to certify Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s financial disclosure statement because he hadn’t sold a stock that he claimed he had. Ross insisted the error was simply a mistake. His claim might have been more believable if the OGE hadn’t already had to warn Ross about inaccuracies in previous disclosures, and if he hadn’t also been caught lying to the press about his finances.

Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump began using the slogan “Drain the swamp” to represent his purported intention to stamp out corruption and self-dealing in Washington. From the examples above its pretty clear he didn’t mean what he said.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - June 14, 2019

Impeach Trump - Don't Hold Your Breath

If you’re a Democrat expecting Republicans either in Congress or on the street to turn against Trump anytime soon you should go back to the lessons of Nixon and Watergate. There you’ll find that accusations of wrong doing by the press and Democrats only serve to strengthen their commitment to their guy. We’ve got a long hard road ahead before there’s the slightest chance that Republicans in Congress will turn on Trump and it may never happen if Robert Mueller’s investigation is shutdown as various Republican leaders have repeatedly called for.

Trump like Nixon before him wasn’t loved by leading Republicans, they didn’t trust him to be conservative enough after having been the liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President. It was the beginning of the Watergate investigation that solidified Nixon’s support among the conservative media and leadership. The more the New York Times, the Washington Post and other media outlets reported on his criminal actions the more strongly Republicans supported Nixon.

We can see this in play today with Trump, Republican leadership held their collective noses when Trump won the nomination and backed tepidly through the general election. As repeated Trump administration scandals have been reported such as former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s use of private charters and military aircraft for travel, today’s more powerful conservative media have defended Trump. Congress has generally ignored the unethical behavior including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin who also used private charters and military aircraft for personal travel at the taxpayer’s expense. The same holds true for recently departed Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt who mis-used taxpayer funds for unnecessary security details, construction of a soundproof phone booth in his office and other violations of agency rules.

Even this week’s outrageous Helsinki Summit remarks in which Trump took the side of former KGB agent and current Russian President Vladimir Putin over every American intelligence agency and his own staff in stating that he had no reason to believe that the Russians had interfered with the 2016 election has only briefly ruffled the feathers of a few Republican Senators and media figures. Only a day later everything was back to normal, none of those Senators said they’ll vote against Trump appointees or support Democrats calls to allow congress to review Trump’s tax returns. By the time you read this I expect that Republicans will be talking about how Trump’s two hour private meeting with Putin was a good thing and somehow improved national security.

Even the revelation that Russian secret agent Maria Butina was arrested and indicted on charges of conspiring against the United States hasn’t affected Trump supporters in his party. Of course that might be because she helped funnel Russian government funds to the National Rifle Association which enabled them to spend millions of dollars on the 2016 election.

I’m sorry to tell you that until there’s not only a dead body, a smoking gun, video recordings and eye witness testimony from Mike Pence we’re going to be stuck with Trump. It’s not enough to just vote in November, you’re going to need to get your parents to vote, your children to vote and your siblings to vote. If you really want to stop this train wreck you’re going to have to commit to donating a few dollars to Beto O’Rourke’s senate campaign or Mike Collier for Lt. Governor. You’re going to have to volunteer for John Rodgers who is running for Texas House in Guadalupe County or Steve Kling for Texas Senate in our area. Nothing will change if we wait for Republicans to do it.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - July 20, 2018

Trump a Danger to Our Democracy

There is so much press on the latest crazy thing Trump tweets or says that you’d think that was all there is to worry about with his presidency. Unfortunately those things are just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t mean that in just the sense of scale but also in the sense of what is readily visible as compared to the damage being done under that visible layer.

Although the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause prohibits taking things of value, like money, from foreign nations or their leaders Trump continues to profit from their spending at his various hotels and resorts. All Presidents in the last century have avoided such things with those in our lifetimes having put their businesses or investments in blind trusts or otherwise even having the appearance of profiting from their office. Trump does it proudly and often. What’s worse is that the Republican controlled Congress can’t be bothered to take action to enforce it and the courts have thrown out lawsuits filed by those who attempt to hold him accountable.

Trump has made numerous nominations or in some cases appointments of people who were manifestly unqualified. In one case a judicial nominee that couldn’t answer first year law student level questions. In another case the nominee lacked experience and failed to disclose that his wife works in the White House counsel's office. This from the man who when he campaigned claimed that he always hired the best people.

Trump’s first Secretary of Health and Human Services, former congressman Tom Price, was forced to resign over using tax payer funds to pay for private travel expenses. Other cabinet members were caught doing the same thing but managed to get away with it under cover of Price bowing out.

In addition to nominating those who are manifestly unqualified he has been installing agency heads who have previously urged the destruction or shrinkage of the agencies to which they’ve been appointed. First among them is our on former governor, Rick Perry, who when he ran for president said that the Department of Energy was one of the three agencies he wanted to eliminate and now he is the Secretary of Energy. Perry publicly admitted after his appointment he didn’t know that the Department of Energy is responsible for the development and maintenance of the nation’s nuclear warheads.

At the Environmental Protection Agency Trump appointee Scott Pruitt previously spent his career working to dismantle environmental regulations that keep Americans healthy. Pruitt has simply ignored a 2015 law that requires the agency to review areas of the country that aren’t meeting the standard set in 2015 and force compliance in order to protect the health of Americans in those area. Pruitt has begun replacing highly qualified scientific and medical professionals who server on agency advisory committees with people that have a track record of disagreeing with established scientific research and in some cases have financial connections to polluting industries.

Trump has repeatedly attacked judges who have ruled against him on issues like the travel ban. He has attacked the FBI which is investigating allegations of collusion with Russian agents. He has attacked the press and wants to enact laws to make it easier to sue for libel which would weaken the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights.

He has done all this and more in his first year in office and yet the only substantive legislation he has signed is a tax break for millionaires. The damage to our nation and most importantly to our democracy has only just begun.

Trump Tweets Cover for a Host of Sins

I don’t for one moment believe that Trump’s Twitter rants are calculated measures designed to cause the public’s eye to watch one hand while his other hand he attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act with executive orders, but they do have that effect. His controversial and often insulting lies eat up news cycles to such a degree that both his actions and those of Congress seem to be ignored all too often.

The heartless remarks Trump made while on a phone call with the widow of one of the four United States soldiers killed in Niger have succeeded in stopping most major media sources from asking; what are U.S. troops doing in Niger? Even Congress doesn’t know according to elected officials from both parties.

Among the other damage Trump’s tweets and outrageous behavior have masked are the failure of the Republican controlled Congress to renew funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which along with their proposed budget which makes severe cuts to Medicaid would leave millions of Texas children without any form of health insurance. This means that tens of thousands of Texas children won’t get the health care they need to do well in school which will penalize them in their future earnings.

Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos is rolling back guidance to colleges and universities regarding handling sexual assault allegations which were created to protect young women who far too frequently suffer more punishment than the perpetrators.

Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price was run out of the administration for using tax payer funds to pay for charter flights to various speaking engagements. Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin got a slap on the wrist for doing the same thing to the tune of over $800,000.

Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke is working to eliminate some national monuments and shrink others. He advocates giving big mining and fossil fuel companies access to the lands rather then the public. He has also spent thousands of dollars of public money on charter flights that he could have made on regularly scheduled airlines for a few hundred dollars. Now there’s word that friends and campaign contributors of Zinke have been awarded a $300 million dollar contract to rebuild the power grid in Puerto Rico even though the their company consists of only two people and the company has no experience with such a large scale project.

Our former governor and now Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, has also carelessly used $56,000 in taxpayer money to pay for charter flights that could have been made on scheduled airlines for far less. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has done the same and like Perry and Zinke is under investigation by the inspector generals of their respective agencies.

The members of the Trump administration have exhibited the same callousness and disregard for the public as Trump has and there is no end in sight to the greed, corruption and abuse of the American people. I hope that in the future the news media will spend less time with shocking headlines over Trump’s latest tweet and more on holding him and his appointees accountable to the people they pledged to serve.

Published in the Seguin Gazette October 27, 2017

Trump's Host of Controversies

The controversy of the moment is the unacceptable and un-Christian action taken by Trump to stop Muslim refugees from seven countries from entering the United States. The problems with Trump’s order are several, it was sudden and to all appearances not based on any new intelligence or even the recommendation from his National Security team. The order appears to be unconstitutional at least to the eyes of the acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, who he fired for doing her job. I say, for doing her job, because her oath of office calls for her to defend the constitution and her job is to provide counsel to the president so he doesn’t violate it. Yates told him the order was wrong and told her staff not to defend the indefensible in court and she was fired for it. Had she done his bidding Yates would have been complicit in the crime just as the German soldiers were who claimed they were just following orders as they gassed Jews in places like Auschwitz.

Trump’s action on refugees is far from the only issue worthy of protest. Hearings are still going on for his often incompetent, occasionally dangerous, possibly criminal, and sometimes unethical nominees for cabinet posts as well as a terrible nominee for Supreme Court justice.

So we have a C student from Texas A&M nominated to head the Department of Energy which among other vital tasks is responsible for the safety and maintenance of our nuclear arsenal. Yes, it’s former Governor Rick Perry, the same incompetent dullard who ran for president and wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy entirely except he couldn’t remember its name during the debate. Now he says he hadn’t realized how important the agency is. Don’t you think the responsible thing to do before you suggest eliminating something is to find out what it does?

Then there’s Betsy “Billionaire” DeVos who never saw a public school she didn’t want to dismantle to feed her investment portfolio and has been nominated for Secretary of Education. Senator Al Franken asked DeVos for her views on the controversy over mastery versus improvement for judging student achievement and teacher competence. Sadly DeVos is so incompetent she didn’t even understand the question let alone have a coherent response. For someone who claims to be informed about education in general and public schools in particular Betsy “Billionaire” seems mighty ignorant.

Trump’s dangerous nominee for the job of among other things defending civil rights is a man with a history of using his position to prevent minorities from exercising those civil rights. The nominee is Jeff Sessions who was previously denied a federal judgeship by a Republican controlled Senate due to his racist actions in attempting to prosecute African American voter registration volunteers for doing their best to turn out voters to the polls. Sessions also took credit for prosecutions while a US Attorney for which he didn’t even exercise oversight let alone actively participate.

For a potentially criminal and certainly unethical nominee there’s Tom Price who is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s been proven to have invested in medical product companies then used his position as chair of the committee overseeing them to improve their profits thus fattening his own wallet.

Finally, there’s Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for justice on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch decided the Hobby Lobby case which defying all logic allows a business to claim it has religious rights just like a natural person. He opposes regulation of businesses, so it’s OK if the coal mine poisons the water for everyone downstream.

Trump and cabinet full of conflicts of interest

The big reason that elected and appointed officials at both the state and federal level are supposed to disclose their business interests is to allow the public to recognize conflicts of interest which in many instances is enough to prevent them. Texas has state disclosure regulations and so do most cities. Congress passed and President Obama signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge or STOCK Act in 2012 which makes it illegal for federal officials, whether elected or appointed such as cabinet members to profit from their knowledge of upcoming legislation or regulations or other information not available to the general public.

For roughly the last 40 years presidents have thought it appropriate to put their holdings into what is called a blind trust. That’s essentially like a mutual fund where the shareholder doesn’t know which stocks are owned. In this way a president can’t know how the decisions he makes or the agreements he signs will affect his personal finances so they shouldn’t affect the decision and he can’t profit from advance knowledge.

Donald Trump continues to refuse to produce his tax returns which are one way the American people could determine for themselves whether or not he takes undue advantage of a president’s far ranging access to secret information. Nor will he put his assets in a blind trust. Instead he says his children and managers will handle business for him but he’ll still know what companies he is invested in and what if any affect his decisions will have on those businesses before anyone else.

Last week in what appears to be an effort to curry favor with Trump the government of Kuwait has cancelled their reservation with a competing business and changed the location of an event to a Trump owned hotel.

While on the campaign trail Trump bragged that he knew how to game the system and therefore he knew how to clean it up but his actions so far suggest he has no intention of doing so. Trump’s nomination of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson to be the next Secretary of State, a position in which he will have numerous illegal conflicts of interest given his holdings in Exxon stocks and Exxon’s business dealings with Russia among other countries is just one reason for concern. Another problematic Trump nominee is Congressman Tom Price for Secretary of Health and Human Services who has traded stock in at least forty health care companies while on the House committee that regulates them. More worrying is that close Trump advisor Newt Gingrich has proposed that Trump can simply pardon his cabinet members for the crimes of conflict of interest and continue as if they were legal to begin with.

Many people voted for Trump in the belief that he wouldn’t tolerate this kind of gaming the system but it seems he’s already letting them down. If you’re one of those people you certainly have a right to be angry. There are other examples of him backing away from campaign promises such as I’ll “drain the swamp”, “build a wall” and “lock her up”. I foresee more to come, so if you’re having buyer’s remorse now or feel it later the Resistance will welcome you.

 Published in the Seguin Gazette December 29, 2016