August 15, 2020

Trump Breaks the Law Again and Republicans Don’t Care—Again

Chad Wolf, the guy currently pretending to be head of Homeland Security even though his appointment was illegal.Pool/Abaca via ZUMA

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Donald Trump loves to fill vacant positions by simply appointing acting officials, thus bypassing the Senate confirmation process that he finds so annoying. Unfortunately for him, that’s not always legal:

The top two officials at the Department of Homeland Security are serving unlawfully in their roles, the Government Accountability Office said Friday, dealing a rebuke to President Trump’s affinity for filling senior executive roles in his administration with “acting” leaders who lack Senate confirmation.

Good for the GAO, but how many divisions do they have? This is a president who’s deliberately wrecking the post office to gain a partisan advantage over Democrats. He sent domestic troops to Portland to create chaos that would help sell his law-and-order campaign theme. He’s pulled the birther card against Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, and now Kamala Harris. He had protesters near the White House gassed so he could do a photo op. He pardons his pals even if they’ve committed crimes so obvious that even Bill Barr calls their prosecution righteous. He retweets lunatic QAnon conspiracies. He tried to get a foreign leader to open a criminal investigation of a political opponent. He has relentlessly tried to undermine the census. And he’s done all this stuff without a peep of protest from anyone in the Republican Party.

So what are the odds that anyone will try to make him obey the law now? About zero, I think.

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