Trump's Assault On The Constitution And Laws Intensifies

Two stories today to point to that demonstrate the willingness of would- be autocrat Donald "Rump" Trump and his party of hyenas to trample on the Constitution and on a law of the land (our emphasis throughout).

Congress "Has No Standing" To Investigate Trump

The White House’s top lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee chairman Wednesday that Congress has no right to a “do-over” of the special counsel’s investigation of President Trump and refused a broad demand for records and testimony from dozens of current and former White House staff.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) constitutes a sweeping rejection — not just of Nadler’s request for White House records, but of Congress’s standing to investigate Trump for possible obstruction of justice. In his letter, Cipollone repeated a claim the White House and Trump’s business have begun making: that Congress is not a law enforcement body and does not have a legitimate purpose to investigate the questions it is pursuing. 

The Sabotage of the Affordable Care Act Continues

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to keeping government transparent and accountable, and this report is part of its Web Integrity Project, which tracks government websites. This study has "documented 26 instances of ACA censorship—including excised words, removed links, altered paragraphs, and removed pages—on HHS websites." Furthermore, it reports, this "may represent only a small sample of the censorship that has occurred since President Trump took office." The censorship is widespread, with information that was intended for the general public, for prospective customers, for beneficiaries, and for providers and insurers all removed. That includes HHS having "surgically removed the term ‘Affordable Care Act’ from many webpages; taken down information on rights guaranteed under the ACA; eliminated statistics and data on the ACA's impact; and removed links to the federal government's main platform for enrolling in ACA coverage, HealthCare.gov."

The deletions, tracked with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine on pages monitored by Sunlight, seem intended to make it much harder for people to find out about eligibility for ACA coverage, how to sign up, and what benefits are available. More troubling, Sunlight says, the information that has been systematically removed is particularly relevant to women and to people of color, as well as to LGBTQ people and people with mental illness—in other words, the most underserved communities, and those who've gained the most through Obamacare.

 As we and others are saying, the lights aren't flashing yellow any more; they're on red.