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Notes -
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
You may or may not remember that back in January of this year President Trump, in his personal capacity, sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in damages related to leaks of his tax returns by a contractor back in 2018-2020. I don't want to dig into the merits of the case as such, except I'll note the legal discussion I've read seems to have a consensus that the case is very weak. It is also very unusual for a sitting President to be suing the government he is in charge of. There are obvious conflicts of interest involved. So much so the judge in that case issued an order for the parties to explain how they are actually adverse to each other, how they disagree, so that the cases and controversies requirement of the constitution is satisfied.
As of today, it seems we may never find out how good the claims are or aren't, how adverse the parties are or aren't. Trump filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit, pursuant to the establishment of a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". It's not even clear to me the fund is going to be administered by the United States government, as paragraph C provides:
Is this going to be the new normal? If you're President and Congress won't give you the money you want to pay your friends and allies you can get however much you want with this one weird trick!
ETA:
ABC reports that the fund will be overseen by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, but the members will all be removable at-will by the President.
MAGA is the most corrupt political movement in my lifetime in the US. It might be the most corrupt movement in US history, though I'm not sure how it would compare to some of the stuff in the Gilded Age. Republicans deflect the open corruption of Trump by presuming (mostly without evidence) that "all politicians do it, Trump is just honest about it!!!" Then they go off on something like Hunter Biden or Congressional stock trades, which involve like 1/100th of the value of what Trump is doing.
And Dems don't care that much either, as they'd rather focus on hallucinations like Trump raping children with Epstein. The corruption might appear in the laundry lists of grievances they throw out against Trump, but it's hardly a motivating factor for most.
Plainly absurd, you only need to look at wtf was going on with USAID and the ficticious X millions for gay condom art to zanzibar to see your statement is absurd. In fact the money was flowing for Dems propaganda and elections.
To say nothing of the multiple trillion dollar bills passed under Biden that did nothing but siphon money to leftists. In terms of scale of corruption, all of American history combined looks like amateurs compared to the modern progressive movement. They just manifestly hold an explicit "it's (D)ifferent and good when we do it" mentality and then mindkill themselves into retardation when they get asked questions like "Why does it cost $150 billion to NOT build a rail line?"
If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire and half the Democrat party would be wearing a barrel with suspenders.
What bills are you referring to? I'm sure somewhere in the appropriations there might have been a few dozen million that got directed to progressive NGOs -- and I'd consider that a bad thing, mind you -- but nothing to the level of "multiple trillion dollar bills that did nothing but siphon money to leftists".
This is an issue of excessive regulation, not corruption. It's still a big problem and is a stain on California's reputation (and by extension all left-wing governance), but it's different then something like Trump's memecoin.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill. Both shoveled out insane amounts of money for ostensible purposes that never materialized because all the cash was absorbed into the pockets of Democrat interest groups that donate to and organize in favor of the Democrats.
Just so with your point about over-regulation. If the state government instructs the agencies to devise "regulations" that siphon money away from ostensible purposes and into the pockets of allied groups that donate back to the politicians, that's actually even worse than regular corruption because it's institutionalized and on-going and metastasizes corruption towards the state in general.
Memecoin, by contrast, is piker shit that only hurts the people involved.
For what it's worth, bills were voted in by congress, the legislative body, which were voted in by voters, so at least in some sense that's the will of the people that insane amount of money were shoveled into ostensible purposes.
Here it's Trump's IRS pitting against Trump's DOJ, both under the executive, making a settlement. Not a judge ordered settlement, but the two comes to settlement (wink wink nod nod) together.
Sarah Isgur (Trump 1 DOJ spokesperson) makes a good point that the proper way would have been to "en banc" the case so that the statue of limitation is frozen. The case would have resumed when Trump is merely a citizen and not the current president, and he would have likely won because the case is pretty solid.
She commented that the judge of the case asked a legal point on how: "It is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy [the Constitution’s] case or controversy requirement.". The judge then asked that both sides submit more information to answer and make claim their position on the point she made. Then conveniently the two teams (and remember, they both work for Trump) drop the case and settle two days before the judge's deadline.
Look, if Congress pass laws to appropriate this $1.7 billion for the same purpose, there won't be an outcry because again, in some sense it flows from the will of the people. Like almost all crimes, it's how you do something that's important, not what was achieved.
edit1: "the outcry would be less justified"
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These shoveled money everywhere. Sure, woke leftists ended up getting some amount of it I'm sure. But Texas also got a crapton of money for being the model state in rolling out renewable energy.
I don't know of many, if any examples of this happening. What usually occurs is the regulations have a decent reason to exist but which probably fail a cost-benefit analysis on net, with the reasoning that the optimal number of people dying to environmental hazards is not necessarily zero. And then a lot of them get abused by NIMBYs grasping for any veto-points they can find.
Trump used the memecoin to effectively sell pardons off to people.
Was it here that someone mentioned that green projects run into some of the worst NIBMY obstructionism?
I wouldn't be surprised. The fact that Texas is lapping California when it comes to clean energy initiatives is a dire indictment of leftist governance at the state/local level.
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