ChrisWeigant.com

How Long Before The GOP Congress Votes Itself Out Of Power?

[ Posted Thursday, February 6th, 2025 – 17:01 UTC ]

President Donald Trump and his "first buddy" Elon Musk have moved swiftly to precipitate more than one constitutional crisis during the first few weeks of the new administration. The two are running roughshod over the basic separation of powers in American government, aided and abetted by the Republicans in control of Congress. Which leads to a serious question -- how long will it be before they just wash their hands of all pretense of power and formally hand it all directly to Trump?

Sound farfetched? Well, it's happened before. Legislatures have essentially disbanded themselves or made themselves completely irrelevant by handing over -- to one man -- not only the "power of the purse" (the ability to set the government's budget) but also the ability to write all other laws as well. If this comes to pass, it'll be called a "temporary emergency measure," but it will be the death knell of the separation of powers. All that will be left would be for Trump to ignore the Supreme Court, and he will have seized full control of all levers of government. There would simply not be anyone left to stop him, at that point.

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No Adults In The Room

[ Posted Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 – 16:22 UTC ]

This is what having "no adults in the room" looks like. This is what a president surrounding himself with yes-men (and a few yes-women) while firing anyone who tells him "No" truly looks like. Donald Trump is president, but it now appears he doesn't just want to be a king, he wants to be an emperor. He wants to revive the American empire worldwide by the addition of several properties (by force, if necessary). His new bright idea was unveiled last night -- he now wants to own the Gaza Strip. It wouldn't become the 51st American state, but more like the 54th (behind Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, assumably). This idea is so bonkers it staggers the imagination just to even consider it. But, because the president of the United States introduced it, people now have to think about it.

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Panama And Taiwan

[ Posted Tuesday, February 4th, 2025 – 17:03 UTC ]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio made his first visit abroad this week. He went to Panama and reportedly pushed them to do something about the Panama Canal, in order to somehow appease President Trump's obsession with it. So far, they've refused to do so. Perhaps this is all just as performative as Trump's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't tariffs on Canada and Mexico -- perhaps Trump will find some way to declare victory and move on to other strange obsessions. Panama could, for instance, slightly lower the rates for ships to pass through their canal, either just for American ships or for all ships. That would probably be enough for Trump to move on.

Trump's stance on the Panama Canal is downright delusional. Rubio didn't echo the weirdest of Trump's claims (that Chinese soldiers are actually running the whole operation), he instead tried to somehow square it with the treaty Panama and the U.S. signed which gave them the canal in the first place. Panama is supposed to operate the canal in a totally neutral fashion, and (according to Rubio) they are not, because China operates two of the five ports at either end of the canal. This is, of course, ridiculous (the ports have nothing to do with the operation of the canal itself), but it's better than claiming to see Chinese soldiers where they do not exist, at least.

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Strong And Wrong

[ Posted Monday, February 3rd, 2025 – 17:03 UTC ]

Today I read the first of what will likely be a number of Democratic post-election analyses, in an effort to identify what went wrong for the party in 2024 and what should be done to fix it going forward. And I've certainly thought about the subject myself in the past few months, so I thought I'd offer up a rather different take.

The analysis in question does not come from the Democratic Party itself, but from two senior fellows from the Brookings Institution who published their paper on the website of Third Way, which is a so-called "centrist" organization. That's how many describe it, but it's really more of a "corporatist" organization devoted to making sure the Democrats stay in lockstep with big business and Wall Street more than anything else. If Bernie Sanders-style socialism is at one end of an ideological spectrum of Democrats, Third Way would be at the opposite end. Here's one line from their conclusion, in case you have any doubts:

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Friday Talking Points -- Meritocracy? Don't Make Me Laugh.

[ Posted Friday, January 31st, 2025 – 18:05 UTC ]

We begin today with an apology and a solicitation for donations. Our apology is for perhaps not doing as thorough a job of reviewing the past week as we normally do, because last night instead of doing our homework we instead watched the FireAid benefit concert for the victims of the recent Los Angeles fires. If you missed it, at least check out the fireaidla.org site, where you can donate to the cause if you wish. It was quite a show, and well worth watching (note: this review contains only a partial list of the performers...):

FireAid's organizers understood the scale of that balancing act, inviting Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Earth Wind & Fire, Green Day, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, John Fogerty, No Doubt, Rod Stewart, Olivia Rodrigo, Sting, Alanis Morissette, Lil Baby, Peso Pluma, John Mayer and others to participate in a sprawling revue divided between two arenas and streamed live on multiple platforms for nearly six hours. It all felt as sweeping as it did familiar, with the show's main surprise pushing the gathering's familiarity threshold toward its limit -- the surviving members of Nirvana gnashing and pummeling through a visceral mini-set, fronted by the likes of St. Vincent, Kim Gordon and Joan Jett.

Sadly, there was yet another tragedy this week to focus on as well, as a commercial airplane crashed into a military helicopter just shy of the runway at National Airport in Washington. And before most of the bodies had even been pulled out of the icy waters of the Potomac River, President Trump offered his words of mourning and tried to pull the country together. For a few seconds, that is. Then he reverted to who he is, in a seriously ugly way:

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Conspiracy Theory Nation

[ Posted Thursday, January 30th, 2025 – 17:25 UTC ]

I begin today by doing something I don't believe I've ever done before. Perhaps this will prove to be uninformed, since I have no real way of knowing if someone else has previously said this (or something very similar). I could just be repeating it without realizing it's not my own original thought, I will fully admit. But in watching the immediate responses to the crash of a commercial jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington D.C., I fear I may have stumbled upon a basic natural law (at least, in this country, at this particular time). Call it "Weigant's First Law of Finger-Pointing," I suppose. Here it is:

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Trump's War On Medical Science

[ Posted Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 – 16:07 UTC ]

The last time he was president, Donald Trump faced a big crisis. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic was erratic at best (and even that's being charitable). Later, he and his followers demonized the doctors and medical experts who were desperately trying to save lives with their advice and recommendations -- so threateningly that President Joe Biden felt the need to pre-emptively pardon Dr. Anthony Fauci right before he left office. Biden feared that Trump would harass Fauci via the Justice Department, so he precluded it from happening.

This time around, President Trump is pre-emptively taking a wrecking ball to the federal government's medical establishment, in what can only be called a war on medical science. It was telling, during the early months of the COVID crisis, that Trump kept complaining that we were doing "too much testing." The numbers of people infected and hospitalized and dying were shooting up dramatically, after Trump had promised the country that they wouldn't. The solution, as far as Trump was concerned, was to just stop testing everyone. That way, there wouldn't be any big numbers to alarm everyone. Hey presto! Problem solved!

This is a rather juvenile approach to a problem, obviously. It is the equivalent of hiding your head in the sand, or sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming: "LA LA LA LA... I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" But Trump saw no problem with this approach.

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A Lawless Presidency

[ Posted Tuesday, January 28th, 2025 – 17:18 UTC ]

President Donald Trump is fast making a warning many Democrats made before his election come true: that he would prove to be an utterly lawless president. Trump's disdain for not only federal law but the entire federal judiciary is becoming more and more apparent, and he's barely begun his second week back in office. He hasn't taken the final step in creating a completely unfettered and lawless executive branch, but at this point it seems only a matter of time before he does so.

Trump began his presidency celebrating lawlessness. He released dangerously violent criminals into the populace, and it's only a matter of time before one of the January 6th insurrectionists commits another shocking and violent crime. One was just killed by police after resisting arrest, in fact, less than a week after being pardoned. Trump celebrates political violence and lawlessness -- as long as it is in support of him, of course.

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Cracks In Republican Unity

[ Posted Monday, January 27th, 2025 – 17:05 UTC ]

If President Donald Trump's agenda gets stalled in any way, it's going to happen because of dissent within his own Republican ranks. And one week in to Trump's second term, cracks are already appearing in the MAGA facade. How deep or wide those cracks may become is still an open question, but it certainly is interesting to see them appear so quickly.

The Republican Party has an incredibly thin majority in both houses of Congress. They can only afford to lose three Senate votes on any party-line issue, and their margin is even slimmer over in the House. This gives incredible power to recalcitrant GOP members, some of whom are impervious to Trump's threats of in-party retribution. This coming week will be an interesting one, because we may just see those cracks widen even further.

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Friday Talking Points -- Out-Of-Control Eggflation!

[ Posted Friday, January 24th, 2025 – 18:45 UTC ]

In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."

Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.

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