Stephan: This may seem deep in the weeds, but the implications for an honest government are profound. If Trump is re-elected in four more years, the democratic government we have known all our lives will be gone. Without these civil protections, anyone who crosses Trump will be fired.
President Trump departs Wednesday from the White House to travel to North Carolina for anelection rally. Credit: Alexander Drago/Reuters
President Trump has fired his biggest broadside yet this week against a federal bureaucracy he has moved to remake with an executive order that would remove job security from an estimated tens of thousands of civil servants.
The directive, issued late Wednesday, strips long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking, allowing them to be dismissed with little cause or recourse, much like the political appointees who come and go with each administration.
Federal scientists, attorneys, regulators, public health experts and many others in senior roles would lose rights to due process and in some cases, union representation, at agencies across the government. The White House declined to say how many jobs would be swept into a class of employees with fewer civil service rights, but civil service experts and union leaders estimated anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in a workforce of 2.1 million.
It would be a profound reimagining of the career workforce, but one […]
Stephan: The general effect of the internet on democracy is negative; this report explains why I feel as I do. It is time to address this issue in our culture, and resolve the conflict between free speech and deliberately distributed disinformation propaganda. For instance any channel holding a broadcast or cable federal license should be required to broadcast only objectively verifiable facts.
lifetime ago, on Sept. 14, Greg Vanlandeghem sat outside a café in Holly, Mich., and explained to me that he planned to vote for the President’s re-election because he saw the race as a contest between two bad options. “We’ve got a guy trying not to die,” he told me, “and we’ve got Trump.”
The candidate Vanlandeghem described as “trying not to die” was Joe Biden, the 77-year-old former Vice President, who’s been dogged by right-wing attacks on his mental acuity. But now, the “guy trying not to die” might well be the 74-year-old President, who was being treated with supplemental oxygen and a battery of drugs after contracting COVID-19, a lethal virus that can cause everything from pneumonia to strokes to neurological impairment. Vanlandeghem, a 37-year-old home builder, is a social and fiscal conservative, but he didn’t vote for Trump four years ago and considers the President a “buffoon.” If anyone’s mind was going to be changed by Trump’s diagnosis, I thought perhaps it might be him.
Vanlandeghem was unfazed. “I think it’s unfortunate,” he said, after I called him back to ask his opinion on the latest updates. “But it’s something that a vast majority of the population is going […]
Stephan: Here is some excellent good news. Pope Francis is trying to move the sexually disturbed Roman Catholic Church into the 21st century. I am sure, however, there will be enormous pushback from within the church.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis called for the passage of civil union laws for same-sex couples in a documentary that aired in Rome on Wednesday, in a major departure from the position held by the Vatican’s doctrinal office.
“Homosexuals have a right to be part of the family,” the pontiff said in “Francesco,” a documentary about his life. “They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”
“What we have to create is a civil union law,” he added. “That way, they are legally covered. I stood up for that.”
While serving as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis endorsed civil unions for gay couples as an alternative to same-sex marriages. However, he had never come out publicly in favor of civil unions as the pope.
“It’s not surprising coming from Pope Francis because of the trail of individual statements he has made here and there over his papacy,” Prof. Bruce Morrill, the Chair in Roman Catholic Studies at […]
Stephan: Here is some more good news from the Catholic media. I don't think it will make any difference to Moscow Mitch and the Republicans senators, but it may be an indicator about how Catholics will vote. Biden is a practicing Roman Catholic.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, attends the third day of her Senate confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington Oct. 14. Credit: CNS/Reuters/Demetrius Freeman
The United States Senate should reject the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
We believed it was wrong for the Senate to consider this nomination in the first place given the precedent set four years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, nine months before the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold hearings on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland, saying repeatedly that the American people should have a say in the matter. This year, when the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg created a vacancy less than nine weeks before Election Day, McConnell has seen fit to ram through the nomination.
The hypocrisy is rank, and it is impossible to see how rushing this nomination will be good for our democracy. The enmity caused by […]
Spencer S. Hsu, Investigative Reporter - Washington Post
Stephan: Here is some more good news. One hero judge, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, has blocked the vile heartless attempt of Trump to cut off food stamps for hundreds of thousands of Americans. She not only ruled against Trump, she condemned him.
I do so hope that in 13 days we can finally get rid of this orange monster and all the orcs that serve and support him.
Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, Judicial hero Credit: Washington Post
A federal judge on Sunday formally struck down a Trump administration attempt to end food stamp benefits for nearly 700,000 unemployed people, blocking as “arbitrary and capricious” the first of three such planned measures to restrict the federal food safety net.
In a scathing 67-page opinion, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of D.C. condemned the Agriculture Department for failing to justify or even address the impact of the sweeping change on states, saying its shortcomings had been placed in stark relief amid the coronavirus pandemic, during which unemployment has quadrupled and rosters of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have grown by more than 17 percent, with more than 6 million new enrollees.
The rule “at issue in this litigation radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving States scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans,” Howell wrote, adding that the Agriculture Department “has been icily silent about how many [adults] would have been denied SNAP benefits had the changes sought . . . been […]
