Donald Trump met with King Abdullah II of Jordan today and the one idea he probably got from that meeting is becoming a king himself.
Trump has appointed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to go through departments of the federal government to find so-called waste and fraud and if their own communications are to be believed, he’s cutting spending illegally. Emails from within DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency named after Elon’s Bitcoin scam) show that they were trying to stop payments to government contractors.
Elon, who is an unelected bureaucrat, and the young Nazis he hires do not have the authority to cut spending. For that matter, neither does Donald Trump. Government spending is legislated through Congress.
Trump has ordered hiring freezes, cuts to spending, and firings without any authority. It’s just him and Elon doing it while JD Vance cheerleads it while Republicans in Congress who know it’s wrong, mumble defenses of it.
Our nation is not governed by one man or even just one branch. There are three branches of the government and despite what Senator Tommy Tuberville believes, those branches are NOT the House, Senate, and Presidency. In case you’re a MAGAt, the three branches of the federal government are Executive (presidency), Legislative (Congress), and Judicial (the courts). These three branches are supposed to be the checks and balances that keep our nation a democracy and not a dictatorship. Our checks and balances are failing.
Trump ordered the freezing of federal grants until he could choose which projects to fund and which to eliminate. Democratic attorneys general from across the nation sued in federal court, and Judge John McConnell ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the spending. Guess what. Trump has defied that order.
Judge McConnell said on Monday that the White House defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants. This is the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.
The judge wrote that his order was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.”
Today from the Oval Office, Trump said he always follows a judge’s ruling. Obviously, that was a lie.
Vice President (sic) JD Vance rolled off a couch and said, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Sure, but these moves by Trump are not the executive branch’s “legitimate power.”
More than 40 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s orders, which include revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon access to the Treasury Department’s payment system.
The Judge wrote, “These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the T.R.O. (temporary restraining order). The earlier ruling (that had been ignored) ordered the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel or terminate” money that had already been allocated by Congress (because that’s their role) to the states to pay for Medicaid, school lunches, low-income housing subsidies, and other essential services. You know, things Republicans don’t like.
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