In 2017, when now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a senator from Florida, he posted this on social media about the United States Agency for International Development: “Foreign Aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”
CLINTON DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL
It’s a truism that it is extremely difficult to govern with a tiny majority in the House of Representatives. When there are no vacancies, there are 435 members; if everybody shows up, it takes a bare majority, 218 votes, to pass a bill. In practical terms, a majority party needs well over 218 seats to ensure it can win party-line votes. There will always be members who don’t show up or take the other side, and the majority needs enough to win the vote even while losing a few on its own side.
After nightfall on Jan. 24, President Trump summarily dismissed as many as 17 of the most important guardians of integrity in the federal government — the inspectors general who search for fraud and abuse in each major executive department, who assure taxpayers that their money is being properly spent, and whose rigor reduces the temptation of corruption. Mr. Trump’s action was in overt defiance of a law requiring that Congress get 30 days’ notice when an inspector general is fired, along with the detailed reasons for the termination, but it was very much in keeping with the president’s imperious resistance to any form of accountability, oversight or sharing of power.
President Donald Trump has thrown the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 Capitol riot prosecutions out the window. But a week before Trump became president, the Department essentially did the same to its own investigation of Trump. The Department’s hand-picked Trump prosecutor, Jack Smith, quit and released a report on the investigation that resulted in the indictment of Trump on four counts involving the 2020 election and Jan. 6. The report did not have a lot of new information in it – Smith has poured out his evidence in filing after filing for more than a year – but it did contain Smith’s assessment that he could have convicted Trump had Trump not won the presidency and is thus no longer subject to federal prosecution.