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What Color Is Her Armband? -- Tom Sullivan
https://digbysblog.net/2025/05/18/what-color-is-her-armband/They’re telegraphing what’s in store
“The U.S. presidency makes the occupant of that office the most powerful person on the planet,” Andrea Pitzer declares at the opening of her latest “What Comes Next” podcast. “If you’re someone whose deficiencies cry out for more submission to you and more adulation of you, how hard it’s gotta be to have so much power and yet be denied those few extra steps that would deliver you right to dictatorship?”
Step by step, a cabal of MAGA autocrats backing Donald Trump has taken us there. Now their task is to sink the roots deeper and make it harder for lovers of freedom and defenders of our constitutional order to dislodge Trump’s nascent dictatorship.
The Washington Post (gift link):
. . .
This is not a drill, The Lincoln Project makes plain in its latest video. “Make no mistake– they’re coming for your free speech.” The Trump adminstration is telegraphing what’s in store. Coming for you is in the planning stages. Noncitizens already know what that looks like.
. . .
Step by step, a cabal of MAGA autocrats backing Donald Trump has taken us there. Now their task is to sink the roots deeper and make it harder for lovers of freedom and defenders of our constitutional order to dislodge Trump’s nascent dictatorship.
The Washington Post (gift link):
Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week.
Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that outlines how investigations of elected officials should be conducted.
If adopted, the changes would remove a layer of review intended to ensure that cases against public officials are legally sound and not politically motivated. Career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section guided and signed off on the criminal investigations into alleged corruption by New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and former Democratic senator Bob Menendez.
Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that outlines how investigations of elected officials should be conducted.
If adopted, the changes would remove a layer of review intended to ensure that cases against public officials are legally sound and not politically motivated. Career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section guided and signed off on the criminal investigations into alleged corruption by New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and former Democratic senator Bob Menendez.
. . .
This is not a drill, The Lincoln Project makes plain in its latest video. “Make no mistake– they’re coming for your free speech.” The Trump adminstration is telegraphing what’s in store. Coming for you is in the planning stages. Noncitizens already know what that looks like.
. . .