Trump Uses Vetoes for Political Retaliation
The vindictive pettiness continues.
Trump has used his first two vetoes of his second term to exact petty political revenge. His first veto was of a clean water project, because he is mad Colorado convicted an ally of his, Tina Peters, for trying to interfere with the 2020 election on his behalf. In the second case, he denied the expansion of tribal lands for the Miccosukee Tribe because they participated in a lawsuit against Trump’s Alligator Alcatraz project.
Because, you know, the purpose of legislation should be to fulfill the petty needs, desires, and raw feelings of the President of the United States instead of weird things like the unanimous consent of the Congress or silly things like public health.
Via 9News: Trump vetoes bill to fund Arkansas Valley Conduit in Colorado.
Monday’s veto comes after Trump promised retaliation against Colorado for keeping his ally Tina Peters in prison. Peters was convicted on state charges for a scheme to tamper with voting systems in a search for election rigging in the 2020 presidential race.
Trump is killing the bill to finish the Arkansas Valley conduit, a decades-long project to bring safe drinking water to 39 communities on the Eastern Plains between Pueblo and Lamar. The groundwater there is high in salt, and wells sometimes unleash radioactivity into the water supply.
The Arkansas Valley Conduit is the final component of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which was first approved in 1962. In recent years, the cost estimate nearly doubled.
The pipeline is in Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert’s district. Boebert recently stood up to the Trump administration to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Via Axios: Trump’s first second-term vetoes reject bipartisan bills.
The Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendments Act would expand the tribe’s land to include part of the Everglades National Park in Florida known as Osceola Camp. It also instructed federal officials to protect structures from flooding.
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The president wrote, “despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected.”
While the votes theoretically exist to override the vetoes, I have to wonder if Congress will even be in session soon enough to act, and even if they are, if Speaker Johnson would deign to take the measures back up.
This is all just a reminder of how petty and vindictive a man we have in the White House.
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With the Colorado water project, once again he sticks it to his voters. Beyond the Peters question, that project is in Bobert’s district and he could be retaliating as well for her signing the Epstein discharge petition.
In possibly ongoing revenge against Colorado… Today was to be the last day of operation for coal-burning Unit 1 at the Craig Power Station in Craig, CO. Yesterday, the Dept of Energy declared an energy emergency and issued an order requiring the operator to keep Unit 1 available for another three months. At least as I read the order, “available” is not the same as in actual use. There are a whole series of legally binding orders predicated on Unit 1 being retired today. My local power authority is obligated to stop using its share of the Unit 1 output as of today. Colorado’s long-standing settlement with the federal government on western haze reduction requires shutting down Unit 1 by today. The unit was allowed to operate for the last couple of years without updating its emissions control systems on condition that it shut down today. One of the two mines that supply the three units at Craig was closed in November, the miners laid off, and the reclamation contract starts tomorrow.
I believe that other instances where the Dept has ordered coal plants to go past their scheduled retirement, the order wasn’t an 11th-hour thing, the extension term was longer than three months, and the plants were required to operate, not just be available.
Sometimes revenge is sweet. For example, I sincerely wish for revenge to be taken on this scumbag of a President (and his enablers) once he is ultimately wrested from office.
Petty and vindictive get the call when Trump’s usual 3 Ds – Dumb, Dishonest, Divisive – just aren’t enough to get the job done.
@Scott F.:
I don’t think it will ever happen.
Given what transpired in his first term, and the attempted coup in Jan 6th, and the stash of stolen classified documents in his bathroom, not to mention the fraud conviction on 34 charges in NY, he should have been removed to prison for the rest of his life.
In part this shows the law, as implemented in the US, and especially for rich and powerful people, is too effing slow even to prevent a catastrophe like EL Taco’s second term.
The larger part is that the will just isn’t there. It may be there later, one hopes, but once Merrick Garland waited over a year an half to seriously investigate El Taco for crimes he was obviously guilty of (plus obstruction in the Russian influence matter), all hope was lost.
Not only that, but his co-conspirators were let off easy, except for the RICO case in Georgia. And that was effed up in such a careless manner it’s hard to believe.
And then there’s the fixer court decision, after it could delay legal proceedings no longer, that effectively says an insurrection against the government is within the purview of El Taco’s official duties, and so is interfering in state elections.
In fact, the closest El Taco came to facing any kind of retribution was by Thomas Crooks in Butler, PA.
@Kathy:
The American legal system provides rich and poor alike all the due process they can afford.
@gVOR10:
That’s so cynical, but also very true.
Despite that, there’s also a general deference to even investigate rich and powerful people. Let alone the creature occupying the White House. How about his dear pal Epstein? What did it take to get Weinstein?
When someone like that gets taken down, it’s usually because they’ve lost their power and influence, like Bankman Fried.
You know, I think we’re living in the most cynical timeline, not just the dumbest one.
@Kathy and @gVOR10:
I fully grant I’ve seen nothing in American jurisprudence or politics in my lifetime that should give me any hope that Trump will get his just deserts, given what transpired in his first term and since. The rich and powerful have been given their own set of rules and this condition is as bad as it has ever been.
Nevertheless, Dr. Taylor has convinced me, through his writings here, that the backside of Trump can’t possibly be a return to US politics as usual. Electoral authoritarianism or something similarly unprecedented for us will be necessary for any kind of recovery from the unprecedented norms destruction wreaked on us by Trumpism. And it won’t be enough to tear Trump’s name from DC buildings and do our best to legislatively claw back some semblance of what US governance was before his administration destroyed it.
I don’t have any idea how it could happen, but if Trumpist lawlessness isn’t met with maximal legal consequence and if the oligarchs aren’t taxed to the point they lose some of their rentier power, then what we are left with won’t be America as we’ve known it.
@Scott F.:
I agree returning to normal won’t work. That’s what Sulla attempted, to restore the Republic by, quite literally, dictatorial means. He kind of succeeded in that the structures of the Republic were restored, but only for a brief time. Things began to degenerate shortly after his death.
Restoring the past doesn’t really work. What wrecked the US middle class wasn’t just the adoption of supply-side economics and the weakening of unions. there were other factors involved, from changes in the international monetary system, to societal changes such as women entering the work force in larger numbers, to free global trade. Nor did all these changes take place at the same time.
So returning to the 1960s-70s economic structures of higher taxes and stronger labor won’t work, at least not in the same way it did then. Higher taxes and strong labor may be parts of the answer, but there will need to be more to it.
Finally, such changes take time. The middle class wasn’t squeezed into a precarious balance, forever threatening to collapse, right away after Reagan’s reforms. It took time, and further cuts to taxes, among other things.
Soooo, what’s the over/under line on overturning the vetos, and who’s holding the book?
@Scott F.: To my mind, what we will need to do is “go forward” instead of “go back”.
Let’s imagine what kind of country, and what kind of government we want in the future, and advocate for it.
We might be able to sell, for instance, proportional representation. Or a popular vote for the President.
I agree that “going back” is not a good idea. “Going back” is conservative at the least, if not outright authoritarian. More authoritarianism is bad, even if the authority seems more benign.
@Flat Earth Luddite: There’s probably an option via DraftKings.