Protester since 1960-61 Peace Walk w/ Scott Herrick. #TheResistance#BlackLivesMatter RTs and Likes not necessarily endorsements! I follow back all resisters.
@BasedMikeLee Easy to cheat for Republicans and Trump. Easy for him to nationalize elections by purging voter rolls. Stop lying and embarrassing yourself
@BasedMikeLee The Constitution is a valid agreement-leave it to the states. Your Heritage Foundation study showed no voter fraud- no illegals voting-another valid argument.
Your bill does not make it easy to vote- and you know it. America knows it.
@BasedMikeLee You're a liar. I am a 68 year old woman who was born in California under 1 name, my grandmother changed it when I was 7 for the whole family. Then I got married & changed it again. I have voted for 50 years with the ID I have, under the SAVE Act I would not be able to.
The entire direction of the post-Cold War world is being decided in Ukraine. Either the free world shows it can defend itself from hostile dictatorships, allowing democracy and rights to flourish, or a descent into corruption, might makes right, and volatile spheres of power.
Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.
And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.
His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”
Not whether it works.
Not whether Congress authorized it.
Whether it pleases Trump.
This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?
Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.
Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.
Grow a spine.
This is not about left or right.
It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.
History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj
Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.
Here's what happened:
He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.
These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.
Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.
A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).
The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.
But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.
With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.
And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.
The threat does all the work.
By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.
Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.
If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.
Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR
“Trump’s power grab over the executive branch is intensifying. Trump seems no longer to care much about electoral consequences. It’s almost as if he doesn’t expect elections to matter because he’s going to do everything he can to make them not matter.”
https://t.co/g3usu8pl5x
Remember: no judge or jury has found these boats were trafficking drugs. We're simply taking Trump's word for it.
He’s unilaterally acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
This is a danger to us all.
https://t.co/k9Nlr3q9iE
They didn’t “find” anything.
These are legitimate ballots post-marked by Election Day arriving to legitimate ballot counting centers — as has been standard practice for years and a process that takes place in numerous states regardless of the party in power.
We’d also like to remind the President that HE HIMSELF VOTED BY MAIL.
Americans struggling to pay their student loans are defaulting on other debt too.
In particular, 57% of student loan borrowers in default are also failing to pay their credit card debt.
My @Morning_Joe Chart.
I call Donald Trump America’s enemy. I’ll continue to call him that. Our elections are the heartbeat of our democracy. Without elections, our democracy dies. Anyone who attacks our elections is our enemy. Trump attacks our elections. Always. Hell, he tried to overthrow one of our elections. He purposely sows distrust in our elections. Only an enemy of this country would do that.
From 1966 to 2025 we dropped sterile flies over South America that ate screwworm and thus prevented them from spreading, but the le epic efficient cracked coders at DOGE thought this was a silly waste of the ~0 dollars it cost us.
While Russia bombs Ukraine and kills civilians, President Trump is bizarrelysending a delegation to a conference in Russia to discuss economic development.
I challenged Secretary Rubio today to explain why we would send any U.S. official to a such an event designed to prop up Putin's war machine.
Trump, Musk and Rubio slashed aid and scoffed that it was woke nonsense. Now they're seeing that it not only saved one life every 10 seconds but also protected us from diseases like Ebola. Their actions constituted a security failure as well as a moral one.
More broadly, their fecklessness contrasts with the courage and humanity of doctors and aid workers in Congo and Uganda, lacking adequate PPE but still risking the virus to care for fellow humans.
Trump, Musk and Rubio might learn something from them. https://t.co/kPKj7fqJFZ
The proxy war narrative is finally dead.
The US cut off military aid 18 months ago and demanded a soft surrender, but Ukraine is still fighting.
Trump's pathetic second term has proven that Ukraine answers to no one but themselves.
Ever since the full-scale invasion began, anti-Ukraine voices have claimed that Kyiv is just a proxy for Western interests. The actions of the US government over the last year and a half have completely disproven this theory.
Calling this a proxy war oversimplifies the entire war and robs both Russia and Ukraine of their agency. Russia started this unprovoked war for its own purposes (imperialism), not on behalf of anyone else. Ukraine is fighting an existential defensive war to avoid becoming a demilitarized and russified puppet state, not to do a favor for the West.
The history of Western support also refutes the proxy label. The West was completely unprepared for this type of warfare, and our aid has always been hesitant and insufficient. If the West were running a real proxy campaign, we would have supplied the necessary tools for victory and been at least somewhat ready from the very beginning.
For 18 months, Washington has cut off all military aid and pushed Ukraine toward a non-existant and bad forced peace deal. In a textbook proxy setup, the principal agent decides when the war stops. The US cannot force a stop because Ukraine has its own independent will and continues to resist the genocide it faces.
Ukraine is not a proxy. Calling this unprovoked war and genocide a proxy war is just intellectually lazy
Yesterday, the IDF seized 4 students from their homes in the West Bank, including 20-year-old American, Sama Safi.
The Israeli govt didn’t tell her family or the U.S. Embassy where or why she was being taken & is holding her without charges.
America must secure her release NOW.
50-49: Republicans, by one vote, chose to keep Trump’s insurrectionist slush fund dream alive.
After they fumbled around for hours, we needed just one more Republican to muster the courage to end Trump’s taxpayer handout to cop beaters and felons.
As per usual, they were spineless.
https://t.co/DNSTwTh7F3