Sunday Dose of Democracy:

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump: If it saves the country, it's not illegal
On Saturday night, Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." While Trump had definitely never heard this quote before today, he is in fact quoting one Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously declared himself Emperor. Pretty clear what the would-be dictator is getting at here. Thankfully, it appears that America's judges have not agreed with him thus far.

Take Action: Defend the CFPB from Elon and his DOGE goons!

Government by malicious autopilot
David Dayden, The American Prospect: "When the 'Department of Government Efficiency,' proposed by shadow president Elon Musk, was reimagined from an outside advisory group making recommendations on federal spending to a temporary organization inside the U.S. Digital Service, a division of the Executive Office of the President, I thought it was partially a way to avoid transparency and disclosure rules for advisory commissions. But if you read the executive order that made this transformation, it outlines DOGE’s task clearly. There’s a little clause in there ordering agencies to grant DOGE 'full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.' That’s pretty much what DOGE has been doing, storming databases and systems across agencies. We’ve talked a lot about the control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the government’s primary payment system. They’ve gained access to records at the Small Business Administration, and federal employee data at the Office of Personnel Management, and scientific data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and student data at the Department of Education, and the IT systems of the Labor Department and General Services Administration. Much of this is either possibly or definitely illegal, and so potentially damaging to governmental functioning that one agency has labeled it an insider threat. Lawsuits have been filed, and injunctions and limitations have been issued in some cases. But the question that hasn’t been totally answered is: Why does Musk want this access? They want to integrate artificial intelligence into every facet of government operations, both to automate aspects of government work and to flow data through AI to catch discrepancies. So you have a bunch of techno-futurists who think that the future of government efficiency is either cherry-picking stuff that sounds bad, or running everything through a supposed HAL 9000 super-computer to weed out the waste. Neither will accomplish their aims, and will probably lead to tons of negative consequences in the process. In fact, there are many real-world implications to the great software putsch. The system could really break and your grandmother won’t get her Social Security check on time. But even without that apocalypse, we may have a government run by a malicious autopilot, blind to its own errors and bias. It absolves Musk, and more so Donald Trump, from blame for the conclusions drawn: The AI said that poor people need less food assistance, see, not any human being. It seeks to put government in the hands of whoever controls an algorithm rather than an elected representative of the people. It couldn’t be more at odds with democracy."

Take Action: Defend birthright citizenship and the Constitution!

Trump and Elon execute blatantly illegal power grab
Evergreen Action: Trump and his unelected billionaire crony have dragged our country into a constitutional crisis with his illegal efforts to cut TRILLIONS of dollars in federal funding. If he succeeds, all the programs that keep our water clean, our planes flying, our children fed and our schools teaching will all be gone for good. The good news is that Governor Josh Shapiro has just filed a major lawsuit against the Trump admin, joining a slew of other Democratic leaders in states across the country who are taking to the courthouse to stop Trump in his tracks. This is EXACTLY the kind of response we need to be seeing from every person in any kind of position of power! Will you send a message to your Congressperson demanding that they do everything they can to oppose Trump’s cuts to essential programs?

Voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong
Eugene Ludwig, POLITICO: "Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between 'economic reality' as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline. What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality? For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics. What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. What we have here is a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction. They all shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households. The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks, and the last four years did not turn things around enough for the lower 60 percent of American income earners."

Take Action: Save NPR and PBS from the GOP!

Please don’t use Nancy Mace’s so-called victim hotline, advocates say
Julianne McShane, Mother Jones: "On the House floor Monday night—in a speech that was jarring, graphic, and nearly an hour long—Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against four men from her home state, one of whom is her ex-fiancé. Mace was emotional throughout: She prayed at the start, and paused to take deep breaths a few times. All four accused men reportedly told the Post and Courier they strongly deny the allegations, which have not been independently corroborated. The men have not been charged of crimes. South Carolina’s Law Enforcement Division (SLED), the state police agency, said in a statement that it had opened an investigation into Mace’s ex-fiancé in December 2023 after being contacted by Capitol Police about allegations of 'assault, harassment, and voyeurism,' and that the investigation remains ongoing and will be sent to a prosecutor for review upon completion. Mace also alleged in the speech that South Carolina’s Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson—whom she would likely face in a primary for governor, a race she has said she is “seriously considering” entering—failed to properly investigate the allegations after she brought forth evidence, which allegedly included nonconsensual sexual images of her and others. In a lengthy statement, Wilson’s office rejected Mace’s claims that it did not properly respond, adding that the office had “no role and no knowledge of these allegations until her public statements” and that Mace has never personally reached out to Wilson to discuss her concerns despite having his cell phone number and being at multiple recent events together. All of this has, unsurprisingly, attracted ample news coverage. But one aspect of the explosive speech has gone unexamined: A so-called hotline that Mace said she set up to encourage victims to come forward—which nobody actually answers, and which leading domestic and sexual violence advocates in Mace’s home state of South Carolina say they don’t want victims to call. When I called Mace’s hotline three different times—each time at least one hour apart—on Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to essentially be a glorified voicemail. Every time, the line rang repeatedly before ending with an automated message from Mace herself: 'Hi, this is Congresswoman Nancy Mace, and you’ve reached our office victim hotline. Please note your information is confidential. Please leave a detailed message and we will contact you as soon as possible. You may also text us at this number.' Beep. Deborah Freel, executive director of Tri-County S.P.E.A.K.S., a center in Charleston—part of Mace’s district—that operates its own 24/7 hotline to support survivors of sexual assault, said her staff spent Tuesday testing out the number only to reach the voicemail whenever they called; they also fielded calls from community members concerned that Mace’s number was going unanswered, she said. 'It isn’t a hotline,' Freel told me. 'It’s not connecting a survivor or someone with a concern to the resources that they need in that moment, which is really challenging. If the intention was to get them those resources, then it would be better for them to be directed to either a local or national resource.'"

Take Action: Stop Dr. Oz from dismantling Medicare!

"White supremacists in suits and ties:" the rightwing Afrikaner group in Trump’s ear
Chris McGreal, The Guardian: "Donald Trump’s offer of political asylum to South Africa’s white minority, just days after blocking genuine refugees from travelling to the US, followed years of campaigning by an Afrikaner group that has promoted 'white genocide' conspiracy theories while also lobbying on behalf of Elon Musk’s business interests. Last week, Trump issued an executive order that misrepresented a new South African law, the Expropriation Act, as a racist move to persecute white Afrikaners by seizing their farms without compensation. The law is intended to address deep inequalities as the result of apartheid and colonial legislation that resulted in the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still owning more than 70% of agricultural land more than three decades after the end of the apartheid system imposed by the Afrikaner-dominated government. It permits expropriation in exceptional circumstances, such as abandoned land, but generally requires 'just and equitable' compensation. That did not stop Trump from falsely claiming: 'South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.' The president’s order came after years of lobbying by an Afrikaner rights groups, AfriForum, which caught Trump’s attention during his first term by claiming that white farmers in South Africa were being murdered for political ends and to seize their land. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) civil rights organisation has described AfriForum’s leaders as white supremacists in suits and ties. Musk and the Afrikaner rights group have both sought to turn history on its head by linking the killing of white farmers, land redistribution laws and affirmative action programmes into a common narrative of state-sponsored persecution of racial minorities by the ruling African National Congress."

Deb Haaland vows to protect us from Trump and his billionaire allies
Deb Haaland for Governor: Deb Haaland has fiercely fought for justice and delivered results for working people throughout her life, be it as an organizer, from the halls of Congress, or as Secretary of the Department of the Interior. She will always refuse to sit idly by while Trump and his un-elected billionaire allies unleash chaos across the country and give polluters free rein to destroy our pristine wilderness. We can help Deb fight back against Trump by electing her to the governor’s office in New Mexico. Will you chip in to help this fierce public servant answer the call to service once again?