With all the budget troubles facing Oregon, the Oregon Center for Public Policy wants it to spend more to feed immigrants in the country illegally.
The way things are headed in Oregon there soon won’t be any difference between a citizen and someone here illegally except the right to vote. And some even want to change that, based on the 164,781 Multnomah County residents who voted for a 2022 ballot measure that would have allowed people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in county elections. The ballot measure was defeated, but only by a vote of 52.71% to 47.29%.
“Voting exclusion based on non-citizen censorship is arbitrary, it’s unfair and it disproportionately impacts people of color,” ACLU Senior Policy Associate Mariana Garciá Medina said after the 2022 vote. “It silences the voices of community members.” That logic is reflected in the views of today’s supporters of giving free food to immigrants in the country illegally.
“Right now, some Oregonians face hunger on a daily basis simply because of where they were born,” the Oregon Center for Public Policy says, pleading for residents to “Tell the Oregon Legislature to pass Food for All Oregonians, SB 611“.
The left-leaning think tank, which claims to have a “vision of an equitable Oregon”, apparently doesn’t have a vision of an Oregon that lives within its means.
Undocumented immigrants in the United States are generally ineligible for federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. Only U.S. citizens and certain lawfully present non-citizens may receive SNAP benefits, which currently consume $122.1 billion annually, or 53%, of the Department of Agriculture’s budget.
The Food for All Oregonians Program would provide nutrition assistance to residents of Oregon who are under 26 years of age or 55 years of age or older and who would qualify for federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits but for their immigration status.
SB 611’s sponsors are, of course, almost all Democrats. Its chief sponsors are Sen. Wlnsvey Campos and Rep. Ricki Ruiz. Regular Sponsors are 18 more Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Mark Owens.
The bill would create the Food for All Oregonians Program in the Department of Human Services, require the department to implement the program by January 1, 2027, and mandate that the department conduct statewide outreach, education and engagement to maximize enrollment. The amount of benefits provided to a household participating in the program would be in the same amount provided to a household of equal size that is eligible for SNAP.
As expected, the Oregon Food Bank, a hunger relief organization serving Oregon and S.W. Washington, supports the bill. In written testimony submitted to the Senate Committee on Human Services, which noted the bill is supported by a coalition of more than 165 organizations, Oregon Food Bank argued that many people in the state who work in food production, childcare, healthcare institutions, education, transportation and other critical services throughout the state don’t now get feed benefits and that “Immigration status shouldn’t exclude anyone from being able to feed themselves or their family.”
The committee has also received a deluge of supportive testimony from other individuals and organizations.
Some commenters justify their support for the bill by asserting that Washington and California already provide SNAP-equivalent benefits to non-citizens. That is not exactly so.
Washington has a state-funded Food Assistance Program, called FAP, is a state-funded program that provides food assistance to legal immigrants who aren’t eligible for federal Basic Food benefits solely because of their immigration status., but undocumented immigrants are not eligible. [1]
In California, the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP), a state funded program, provides benefits equivalent to SNAP (called CalFresh in CA) to qualified immigrants who are not eligible for CalFresh, but with limitations. Effective October 1, 2025, CFAP will expand to cover persons age 55 or older regardless of their immigration status.
As for Oregon, SB 611 is being put forward as the state is confronting potential federal funding cuts, everybody and their brother seems to want higher spending on schools, affordable housing, transportation and healthcare, Trump tariffs could lead to a trade war that hurts export-heavy Oregon and fears of a national recession are growing.
But what stands out even more in the current debate over the bill? All of its enthusiastic supporters haven’t the faintest idea what it would cost the state.
But, what the heck. It’s only money.
Addendum
“It’s only money” appears to be the theory behind another bill now before the Oregon legislature that offers benefits to immigrants in the country illegally. On March 15, Pamela Fitzsimmons, writing for Portland Dissent on Substack, reminded Oregonians of a $15 million pilot project Oregon lawmakers approved in 2022 to provide immigrants facing deportation with free state-funded legal representation and of the 2025 bill , HB 2543, requesting another funding round. Fitzsimmons notes HB 2543 would maintain previous funding levels: $10.5 million from the General Fund to the Oregon Department of Administrative Services to be deposited in the Universal Representation Fund, and another $4.5 million from the General Fund to be transferred via the Judicial Department to the Oregon State Bar to provide legal services on immigration matters.
Richard Grenell (L) and his patron, President Trump, Feb. 2025
A New York Times investigation has found that Richard Grenell, one of hundreds of Trump acolytes rooting around in the moral rot of his regime, played a role in securing the release of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who had been detained in Romania, accused of rape, human trafficking and organized crime. The Trump Administration and Grenell have previously denied involvement in the sordid affair.
Asked if the United States had pressed Romania to release the Tate brothers, Trump previously said “I know nothing about that “and that the White House would “check it out”. The brothers got their passports back and on February 27, 2025 flew in a private jet to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The New York Times disclosed today its investigation into the Tate affair had found that in a Jan. 14 text message, Andrew Tate indicated that help was on the way. “I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things,” Mr. Tate wrote to someone close to him, in a message reviewed by The New York Times. “Ive been told I’ll be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami,” he added.
The Times found that “the brothers’ release from Romania was the culmination of a yearslong effort by Andrew to forge alliances with Mr. Trump’s advisers and family members,” including Grenell.
“After Mr. Trump’s re-election, some of the Tates’ supporters ascended into the new administration,” the Times reported on Dec. 10. ” One of them, the diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell, twice discussed their case with Romanian officials, The Times found. “
Grenell is well-known now mostly because of his appointment by Trump to be Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. According to The New Yorker , KennedyCenter staff and others often refer to Grenell as Grendel, a “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” in Beowulf.
Despite Grenell calling Trump “unserious”, “reckless”, and “dangerous” in 2016, he switched to openly praising Trump after he became the Republican Party’s nominee and Trump appointed him Ambassador to Germany in his first term. The Germans were less than pleased. “By challenging accepted convention and diplomatic protocol — that is, by acting very Trump-like — Grenell has sent Germany’s hidebound political class into a fit of apoplexy,” Politico reported.
Grenell returned to the US in 2020 when Trump selected him to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence (DNI). Occupying the post for just about three months, he used this tour to work with Kash Patel (now Trump’s appointee as FBI Director) to purge top officials and gain a reputation as a deeply political animal. Grenell, who feuded publicly with Congress, was “criticized by Democrats and career intelligence officials as the least-experienced and most overtly political official to serve as the DNI,” CNN reported.
On Election Day in 2020, Trump told Grenell to fly to Nevada, where he situated himself in a suite at the Venetian Resort and established a war room to question the results of the election in the state, according to the New York Times. Trump’s team filed a lawsuit and aired false accusations of voting fraud. Trump supplemented the accusations with a tweetthat the state was a “cesspool of Fake Votes,”
The Times reported Grenell told the Venetian team the whole effort was a sham, that the Nevada vote was not stolen and that “… the goal was simply to ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’ to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.”
After Trump left office, Grenell worked on behalf of himself and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who was looking to develop multiple hotel and tourism projects. According to the New York Times, he worked with Kushner on plans for a luxury hotel, apartment complex and museum in Serbia and development of luxury tourist sites on an Albanian peninsula and on a Mediterranean island off the Albanian coast.
The New Republic reported in June 2024 that Kushner’s contract with the Serbian government to bulldoze the bombed-out ruins of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense complex and convert it into a luxury hotel included a fine-print commitment by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to build a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression” — an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign in 1999 that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees in response to its campaign of repression and massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Retired General Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the 1999 bombing campaign, told SpyTalk, a Substack site that covers national security issues, the commitment was “a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”
Grenell also further ingratiated himself with Donald Trump by securing Melania two lucrative speeches in California over two consecutive days in 2022. The California Globe, a right-leaning news website, ran a story about her speeches. The story highlighted her “focus on the welfare of the Nation’s children”and gave her a chance to say readers“…should visit the two marketplaces I built, USAmemorabilia.com and MelaniaTrump.com”.
The Globe article neglected to mention that Melania was paid $500,000 in fees for the speeches.
The New York Times reported that the payments were $250,000 from Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican organization dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives and allies (Grenell is gay) and a $250,000 payment from Fix California, a conservative 501(c)(4)non-profit founded by Grenell in 2021 to support “free and fair elections”.
Fix California’s IRS Form 990 filing with the IRS for 2022 shows Melania Trump’s speaking fee, paid through Designers Management Agency Inc. of New York, consumed about 17% of the group’s total revenue in 2022. The Log Cabin Republicans Form 990 shows Melania’s fee consumed about 20% of that group’s revenue in 2022.
When Trump was elected to his second term, Grenell lobbied hard to be named Secretary of State. Politico reported that an associate of Grenell’s even offered payments to some MAGA influencers to promote Grenell’s campaign for the position (Grenell told Politico that “none of this is true.”), but he lost out to Marco Rubio.
Instead, Trump gave Grenell a more amorphous position, naming him his “envoy for special missions”, a catch-all for a jack-of-all-trades. That did not require Senate confirmation.
Since then, Grenell has popped up all over the place like a fungus.
On January 31, he surfaced in Venezuela to negotiate with its president Nicolás Maduro for the return of Venezuelan migrants in the US illegally and to secure the release of Americans detained in the country. He returned with six Americans who had been detained in Venezuela in recent months.
On Feb. 8, Grenell surfaced again with a tweet calling for an end to government funding of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. “It is state-owned media,” he posted. “These outlets are filled with far left activists. I’ve worked with these reporters for decades. It’s a relic of the past. We don’t need government paid media outlets.” Elon Musk agreed, posting, “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
On Feb. 10, Trump purged the board of the prominent John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., replaced them with Trump loyalists, who voted to install Trump as Chairman and then announced that Grenell would be the new interim executive director.
Then on December 18, Grenell voted with other members of the Kennedy Center’s board to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. The New York Times reported, ” Even though Mr. Trump had already been calling it that for months in trollish posts online, he acted shocked that his handpicked board had thought to do this for him. “I was honored by it,” he told reporters at the White House. “The board is a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country, and I was surprised by it. I was honored by it.”
The New York Times investigation has now reminded Grenell that he can’t hide forever.
A wolf sculpture by native artists Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger made in collaboration with PGF for exhibition at the Denver Art Museum.
Portland, Oregon may be struggling, but there are some promising green shoots.
All the creative American garment design and manufacturing has gone offshore and it’s likely to stay there. That’s what some pessimists say. Britt Howard, Founder and Creative Director of Portland, Oregon-based PGF, doesn’t buy it.
When Intel Corp. wanted to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018, it turned to PGF. The assignment? Breathe life into some garment ideas.
The result? Slick, comfortable updated replicas of “bunny suits” worn in Intel’s super clean microprocessor manufacturing fabs. Then suit up some employees for a lively, eye-catching flash mob on an Intel campus.
Intel flash mob by PGF
In 1960, 1,233,000 Americans were employed in the manufacturing of apparel, 5.5% of the total manufacturing workforce, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2024, only about 84,000 employees were part of the apparel manufacturing industry in the United States.
Now PGF is bringing back some of those “Made in America” jobs with a full-service creative design and fabrication studio.
“At PGF, we combine expert intuition with creativity, design, and flawless execution,” says Howard, who has been shepherding PGF’s evolution since 2008.
Britt Howard at PGF
Howard showed she had some real entrepreneurial chops when she was just 25.
She started Portland Garment Factory in 2008 with $2400 in start-up capital from a supportive friend. A brief contract with the friend essentially said, ‘If you ever get successful, maybe you’ll pay me back.” Eight years later, Howard did so. “And very handsomely,” the friend said.
Howard started out in a 250 sq. ft. Portland studio. The company began as a sole proprietorship, then shifted to a limited liability company (LLC) one year later.
After moving around a bit, the company settled in at a building at 408 S.E. 79th Ave. in Southeast Portland.
Over its first 12 years Howard continued to grow the business, accruing an impressive list of clients, including Nike, Adidas, Cotopaxi and the global advertising agency, Wieden+Kennedy.
In some cases, the company created prototypes of products a company was considering for mass production. Other work included creating product marketing displays and specialty items that could be featured in retail stores to wow customers with their ingenuity.
The company also created sculptures. In one case, it worked with native artists Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger to create Each/Other, a monumental wolf sculpture with a fabric “hide” attached to the steel frame that was exhibited at the Denver Art Museum.
The company made a foray into making baby clothes, too. “We used to make retail products, such as thousands of baby clothes, but we almost went out of business,” Howard said. “The seller wanted to put out a product that sold for $6, but it cost us $40 to make it because of all our overhead. It was really hard to make affordable garments in the United States.”
That was one reason why Howard changed the name of her company to PGF in 2018. “I really needed to recalibrate because we couldn’t survive as just a garment manufacturing company,” Howard said. “We needed to get away from making retail products and get into more commercial work.”
As time went by, everything seemed on track and the company’s future looked bright.
Then, disaster!
Early on the morning of April 19, 2021, a massive three-alarm fire, later determined to have been set by an arsonist, tore through the company’s building, destroying just about everything.
Aftermath of the fire
The potential for failure was breathing down Howard’s neck. But Howard wasn’t out.
A broad network of friends and supporters came to her rescue, starting with a team of nine women who set up a GoFundMe account to help Howard resume her business.
“The morning of April 19th, an arsonist set fire to PGF and everything was burned from the brick walls to sewing machines to skews of clothing for clients,” the account said. “Britt lost years and years of hard work and she needs help from us to re-build her business which employs many women and is a pillar in our community. She has gotten so many fashion labels started, contributed charitably and taken risks to help people build their brands. This money will go toward replacing all the machines that were lost, a deposit for a new location and securing the jobs of her beloved employees.”
An astonishing 1200 donors responded with contributions ranging from $5 to $5,000, generating a total of $119,125.
“Britt has created a Portland mainstay, and Portland needs PGF!,” a $100 donor wrote. “Not to mention, she’s an inspiration and positive force of nature in the B Corp and broader business community here. Sending PGF love.”
While grieving her loss, Howard embarked on a what she saw as an urgent need for recovery. Within 10 months, with the GoFundMe money, insurance coverage and a mortgage, in hand, Howard was able to buy another headquarters building in Southeast Portland, a 10,000 sq. ft. corrugated metal-clad building that had previously been a gym.
PGF Building
The three-level building is usually a beehive of activity for 17 employees, including designers, artists, expert fabricators and a Marketing and Community Coordinator.
Many of the fabricators are Vietnamese who have been with PGF for more than 10 years. “They are skilled sewers and they are really proud of the work they do,” Howard said.
Sewers at work at PGF
“We’re now a full -service cut-and-sew manufacturing company,” Howard said. “We make soft goods, that includes wearables, clothing, accessories, curtains, upholstery items, sculptures. We also do design work in-house and we source the material, so we’re completely one-stop.”
Reflecting her commitment to responsible business practices, Howard has also secured certification of PGF as a B Corp, a company that meets high standards of verified social and environmental performance, and public transparency to balance profit and purpose.
Part of PGF’s commitment to sustainability is the reuse of materials. In 2023, for example, it created cushions using fabric scraps from past PGF projects and designed to invoke 90’s zine culture married to frenetic, modern-era multimedia art. All the cushions were stuffed with pulverized factory scraps, the result of PGF’s zero-waste manufacturing initiative.
To reward and retain her employees, Howard provides them with generous benefits, including health insurance. A particularly useful benefit that came into play when the fire hit PGF’s building in 2021 was payroll protection insurance. That allowed Howard to give paychecks to her employees for 10 months until the business could restart.
Howard has also focused on improving PGF’s operations, hiring a COO for five months in 2023. “She really helped me turn around a lot of the problems we were having, to look at them in a different way, “Howard said. “She created a reporting tool that’s very specific to this business and changed the structure of the business so more responsibility is placed on designated managers instead of everybody reporting to me,” Howard said.
In its new building, PGF has continued to create specialized products for a wide range of clients, including kimono-style uniforms for volunteers at Portland’s Japanese Garden, jackets for Oregon’s Tillamook Cheese company to highlight the launch of a shredded cheese product and Mad Hatter and White Rabbit costumes for an outdoor electronic dance music festival.
It has even created custom blue Nike tracksuits for the cast of the sports comedy-drama Ted Lasso to wear at the PEOPLE’s Post Screen Actors Guild Awards Gala in Feb. 2024.
With the pandemic, the 2023 fire and the fluctuating economy, Howard says business has been uneven in the past several years, but she maintains her optimistic spirit, tempered with acknowledgement that trouble can lurk just around the corner.
In a sign of her continuing optimism and willingness to take risks, in April 2024, Howard bought the assets of Cotton Cloud Futons in Portland’s Slabtown district and rebranded the company’s manufacturing space as “Oregon Natural Fiber Mill.” She hopes the acquisition will enhance her company’s commitment to sustainable textile manufacturing.
Oregon Business covered the deal, noting that the factory milled U.S.-sourced cotton and wool into usable materials with a focus on organic cotton, regular cotton and polyester and that its equipment included a 100-year-old Garnett machine, a massive textile processing mechanism that converts waste into a uniform fiber to be used in other applications.
Never satisfied with standing still, Howard is aggressively pursuing new opportunities “It’s not a chill business, but we’re here to stay,” she says. “There’s lots going on, lots of opportunities everywhere. I just have to know where to put my energies.”
Forrest Gump must have been thinking of Oregon’s Democrats when he said that.
They’re continuing to push a bill, SB 916, that would allow striking workers in Oregon to collect unemployment benefits. Because the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund is funded through a payroll tax that is paid by employers, Oregon employers would be paying workers not to work.
The unemployment insurance program, as the state explains, ”provides partial wage replacement benefits to eligible workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own.” It is not, and was never intended to be, a source of money to compensate workers for refusing to work.
My heavens. The Democrats are shilling for the unions again with a blatant gift. What a shock!
What makes their strong support for this bill particularly egregious is that it is aimed at benefiting an extremely small portion of the labor force, but a sector that overwhelmingly favors the Democrats in campaign contributions.
In 2024, just 15.9% of wage and salary workers in Oregon were union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Dig deeper and you find that the union membership rate for public sector workers in Oregon, about 51%, is considerably higher. That is consistent across the country, where unionization is about five times higher nationwide in the public sector compared with the private sector.
Supporters of SB 916 often try to bolster their cause by alluding to the fact that New York and New Jersey already allow unemployment benefits to be paid to strikers, but they neglect to mention that both states bar public employees, such as teachers, from striking.
If you want to know who’s responsible for this appalling bill, it was sponsored by Democratic Senators Kathleen Taylor, Wlnsvey Campos, James I. Manning, Jr., Chris Gorsek, Mark Meek, and Deb Paterson, as well as Democratic Representatives Dacia Graber and Ben Bowman. The bill was passed out of the Senate Committee on Labor and Business on Feb. 6, with Democrats Senator Khanh Pham, Senator Kathleen Taylor and Senator Aaron Woods voting aye and Republicans Senator Daniel Bonham and Senator Cedric Hayden voting nay.
Now we know it was a towering mistake, indeed, a fiasco, a classic misreading of the market.
Keller Williams Realty Professionals began marketing individual condos at prices ranging from $1,1000,000 for a one bedroom 2 bath 1,105 sq. ft unit to $8,999,000 for a 3 bedroom 4 bathroom 3,256 sq. ft unit. Principal and interest on the mortgage, plus property taxes and condo fees, could have translated to an $8000 a month expense for the 1 bedroom.
Willamette Week’s Anthony Effinger reported today that only 8% of the 132 Ritz-Carlton condominiums have sold, a failure of massive proportions that could have potentially major repercussions for the City of Portland and its struggling downtown core. His entire article is reproduced below:
In July 2025, Ready Capital Corp., based in New York, said it had taken possession of Block 216, the 35-story building in Portland’s West End that has ground-floor retail, five floors of office space, a 251-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel and 132 Ritz-Carlton residences.
The lender to Block 216, Walter Bowen’s gleaming West End skyscraper, sounded an ominous note about the property in an earnings report Monday.
New York-based Ready Capital said the best strategy for its $503 million construction loan would be to take possession of the property, instead of waiting for repayment.
“Ownership is [the] best net present value outcome for RC,” Ready Capital wrote in a 25-page supplement to its fourth-quarter earnings.
Ready Capital CEO Thomas Capasse went into more detail on a conference call.
“While the original strategy was to refinance the construction into a bridge loan, the current appraisal and other factors favored ownership and serial asset disposition on the components as the best net present value outcome,” Capasse said, according to a transcript of the call.
Translation: foreclose on the 35-story building and sell it in chunks.
Block 216 has ground-floor retail, five floors of office space, a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Ritz-Carlton Residences. Ready Capital acquired the Block 216 loan in March 2022, when it bought Mosaic Real Estate Credit LLC, the building’s original construction lender.
Like so many downtown towers, Block 216 has struggled to land office tenants. Just 23% of the office space is leased, according to Ready Capital. Nor has Bowen been able to sell many of the 132 Ritz-Carlton condominiums. Only 8% have sold, according to Ready Capital’s earnings report, at an average of $1,105 per square foot.
The hotel is underperforming, too, Ready Capital said. Its average revenue per available room was $188 in 2024, compared with $343.28, the average for all Ritz-Carlton hotels during the same period. The chain is owned by Marriot International Inc., which provided the average figure in its full-year earnings report.
Ready Capital said it plans to stabilize the three components of the angular glass tower—commercial, condo and hotel—then sell the office space and hotel portion within two years. Unloading the condos will take three years, Ready Capital said.
Neither Block 216 management nor Bowen’s company, BPM Real Estate Group, returned calls and emails seeking comment. Ready Capital’s press office didn’t return an email. Nor did its chief financial officer, Andrew Ahlborn.
One bright spot: Block 216’s retail space, where a food hall called Flock opened in January, is 100% leased, Ready Capital said.
The earnings report spurred a 27% decline in Ready Capital shares on Monday, mostly because the company halved the quarterly dividend it pays to investors to 12.5 cents a share to “better align the dividend with projected cash earnings in the short-term and to preserve book value,” Capasse said on the conference call.
Concern about the Block 216 loan also may have also weighed on the stock. In addition to the $503 million loan, Ready Capital also owns $62 million of preferred equity in the project, for a total of $565 million.
Ready Capital said it has set aside $130 million to cover the declining value of Block 216. Given that reserve, Ready Capital values it at about $435 million. At that valuation, Block 216 accounts for about one-quarter of common shareholders’ equity in Ready Capital.
Ready Capital shares closed at $4.95 today, down from $8.39 a year ago.
OK, Mr. Trump, now you’ve gone over the line. You’ve callously attacked a critical federal agency I worked for earlier in my career and that works to protect the Pacific Northwest, where I live..
An administration that has demonstrated its resistance to science has taken another ill-advised step, firing 800 probationary employees at the of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In addition, about 500 employees left the agency on Friday after taking a so-called deferred resignation offer, the New York Times reported.
This follows a Trump administration order to NOAA earlier this month to search for climate change-related keywords in its grant programs. The Commerce Department instructed NOAA and its divisions to review grants for specific terms like “climate” and “greenhouse gas” without clearly saying why, although there were suspicions it was tied to the new administration’s hostility toward climate change research.
It also follows an Associated Press report that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, appointed by Trump, has privately urged the Trump administration the to reconsider a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change.
According to the Associated Press, in a report to the White House, Zeldin “called for a rewrite of the agency’s finding that determined planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, according to four people who were briefed on the matter but spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the recommendation is not public. The 2009 finding under the Clean Air Act is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources.”
The Trump administration is particularly resistant to climate science because taking the subject seriously would mean reducing the use of fossil fuels, an industry that supported and helped pay for Trump’s return to office and his commitment to American energy dominance.
The probationary employees pushed out at NOAA—who have been in their jobs for a short period and lack the protections afforded to staff members with longer tenure—received a blunt dismissal email on Thursday, according to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and transportation, which oversees NOAA. The email read in part: “[T]he Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
“The firings jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods—putting communities in harm’s way,” Cantwell said. “They also threaten our maritime commerce and endanger 1.7 million jobs that depend on commercial, recreational and tribal fisheries…This action is a direct hit to our economy, because NOAA’s specialized workforce provides products and services that support more than a third of the nation’s GDP.”
“American science, in other words, had performed a remarkable feat: it had given us a timely early warning of the single greatest danger our species has ever faced,” Bill McKibben wrote in the New Yorker. “I listed all the players involved because those agencies—the N.S.F., NOAA, NASA—are precisely the institutions now being told to scrub their Web sites and re-examine their grants for projects that run counter to the Administration’s diktat on climate—and “diversity.”
The attack on NOAA, one of the more visible signs of the Trump administration’s opposition to climate change activism, seems to foolishly reflect a view that blocking research will also halt the reality of long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.
NOAA’s Climate Change Program’s office manages competitive research programs in which NOAA funds high-priority climate science, assessments, decision support research, outreach, education, and capacity-building activities designed to advance our understanding of Earth’s climate system. It also aims to foster the application of this knowledge in risk management and adaptation efforts. The research is conducted across the United States and globally.
Project 2025, a policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration, says the agency is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and calls for it to be dismantled.
During his presidential campaign, Trump firmly disavowed any connection with, or even detailed knowledge of, Project 2025. He has nevertheless filled his new administration with numerous Project 2025 authors and contributors and is pursuing many of the project’s recommendations.
Dear Oregon Legislators. Who are you going to listen to, the unions or the rest of us?
Oregon Democrats, at the request of the AFL-CIO union, have introduced a bill, SB 916, that would allow striking workers in Oregon to collect unemployment benefits. Because the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund is funded through a payroll tax that is paid by employers, Oregon employers would be paying workers not to work.
Public hearings on the bill before the Senate Committee on Labor and Business were held on Feb. 6 and Feb. 11, 2025. Union supporters, particularly representatives of nurses and educators, uniformly endorsed the bill. Pretty much everybody else opposed it.
The bill is sponsored by Democratic Senators Kathleen Taylor, Wlnsvey Campos, James I. Manning, Jr., Chris Gorsek, Mark Meek, and Deb Paterson, as well as Democratic Representatives Dacia Graber and Ben Bowman.
The unemployment insurance program, as the state explains, ”provides partial wage replacement benefits to eligible workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own.” It is not, and was never intended to be, a source of money to compensate workers for refusing to work.
Daniel Perez with the Economic Policy Institute, founded with a pledge from eight labor unions, delivered written testimony before the Committee in support of SB 916. Ignoring the issue of whether paying strikers made sense, Perez argued that it would “result in minimal costs to the state of Oregon “and “would ensure that critical dollars continue to flow into local businesses and communities during strikes.”
Perez argued that over half of strikes end within two days and over the past four years, the median strike duration in Oregon has been five days. Therefore, the bill’s requirement that there be a 7-day waiting period before striking workers would be eligible to apply for benefitsmeant few would qualify. This , of course, ignored the issue of whether strikes would be prolonged if strikers were paid.
The Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA) asserts, for example, that if Portland Public Schools teachers went on a one month strike in 2025, it would cost the Portland school district $8.7 million if SB 916 were law at a time when the district is already struggling financially. ,
Nurses also testified in support of the bill. “By not allowing unemployment benefits, workers are being discouraged from using their legal right to collective action, creating an advantage for employers,” said one nurse. “Many healthcare workers are forced into an indefinite labor dispute without financial support, making it almost impossible to stand up for necessary changes that need to happen in the workplace.”
Individual critics were more blunt, and more persuasive.
“Are you seriously attempting to KILL businesses in Oregon?” said one.
“Stop this wasteful spending on foolish bills.,” said another. “Passing of bills such of this will only benefit the greater Idaho movement and have more business and people move out of the state.”
“This bill appears to be an attempt by certain politicians to woo the union vote, who will in turn donate more money to their campaigns (quid pro quo),” said another.
“When two parties are negotiating, the cost to both sides needs to be heavy or a settlement won’t be reached.,” said another. “Paying striking employees removes the incentive to reach an agreement quickly.”
A coalition of business groups, the Oregon Farm Bureau, the Oregon Forest Industries Council, chambers of commerce, the Oregon School Boards Association and others said the bill would be “putting the state’s thumb on the scale in what should be a negotiation process between workers and employers.” Further, “If public unions strike, the impact to state (or school district, local government) budgets could be catastrophic. This is particularly alarming given the number and frequency of recent teacher strikes.”
Local governments were also outspoken in opposition to the bill.
“At a time when local governments and businesses are grappling with tight budgets, these additional expenses would place further strain on employers who already face rising costs for wages, benefits, and regulatory compliance,” said the Marion County Board of Commissioners. “This could lead to higher taxes, service reductions, or even layoffs, the very scenario that unemployment benefits are meant to mitigate.”
The City of Hillsboro was strongly opposed as well. “This bill provides an unfair advantage to labor in a dispute by forcing all employers to fund the act of striking (or other labor disputes) and undermining the purpose of a strike,” the city said.
In my view, the arguments against paying strikers unemployment benefits clearly win out.
But, given the tendency of Oregon’s Democratic legislators to appease unions, which overwhelmingly bankroll Democrats, the bill may still well go forward. If it does, Portland won’t be the only part of the state in a “doom loop”. The bill would be one more nail in the coffin of the entire state’s competitiveness.
Conservative Republican Congressman Cliff Bentz won his 2024 race in Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District by a comfortable margin. Now there’s a feeling of betrayal in the air. A good number of his constituents in all or part of 20 counties across northern, eastern, central, and southern Oregon aren’t happy with Bentz, as President Trump runs roughshod over government programs and people.
Bentz, who sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, won his 2024 congressional race with 63.9% of the vote, a solid victory, but down from 67.5% in his 2022 race. Recent town hall meetings he held in his district show that his support is on shaky ground.
A raucous crowd of about 300 people showed up at a town hall in Pendleton on Feb. 20 where “attendees continued to interrupt Bentz during presentation [sic], muttering throughout his talk, as well as directly calling out what Bentz was saying,” the East Oregonian reported.
Republican Rep. Cliff Bentz holds a fractious town hall in Pendleton, OR on Feb. 20, 2025. (Credit: The East Oregonian)
Commenting on the firing of thousands of federal employees, Bailey Langley, a former Umatilla National Forest employee, lambasted the White House for being laid off 52 days before the end of her probationary period as a public affairs officer.
“This was a blanket butchering of employees who will one day carry on and sustain the agencies.,” Langley said. “Instead of contributing to our communities in a productive manner, I am now being forced to file for unemployment and other government services. Especially in our rural communities, this is your opportunity as a public servant to stand up for American values, to not follow a king, but serve the people.”
Much of the crowd stood, clapping, whistling and cheering, for more than 20 seconds once she finished, the East Oregonian reported.
“I am not a federal worker, but I, too, am both concerned for my neighbors (that’s everyone in the country), who are going to suffer because of the arbitrary, wholesale firing of those tasked with carrying out the work of government on behalf of all citizens,” a commenter on the East Oregonian story posted later. “We all deserve better. And those who represent us, but refuse to protect us, deserve our anger.”
The La Grande Observer titled its story on Bentz’s town hall there, “Another Town Hall(s) Goes Off the Rails”.
Residents filled nearly all 435 seats at Eastern Oregon University’s McKenzie Theater La Grande and more people packed themselves into the side aisles and stood right outside the theater doors to listen in.
An irritated Bentz chided the La Grande audience, saying a lot of representatives had refused to even hold town halls, so they should be grateful he decided to show up. To say the least, that condescending attitude also was not well received.
“A vocal majority of the audience expressed frustration and anger with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, the firing of thousands of federal workers and the actions of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency,” the Observer reported. “[M]embers of the crowd started booing and jeering the congressman. People shouted “Move on,” “We can read” in reference to the slides projected with the information, and told the congressman to get to the Q&A section.”
The lambasting of Bentz at his Oregon town halls reflects growing public concern about the failure of Congressional Republicans to stand up for the constitutional separation of powers in the United States and for the willingness of Congress as a whole to fail to check presidential abuses of power.
“So now, when an autocratic president sends up patently unqualified nominees to be confirmed, asserts the power to ignore laws and appropriations passed by Congress, shuts down agencies created by Congress and fires officials confirmed by Congress, members of the president’s party are so unaccustomed to making independent decisions or taking responsibility for governing and so convinced that they must maintain party unity to win the next election that they go along,” Steven Pearlstein, Director of the Fixing Congress Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, has written on Roll Call. “For the majority of members of Congress who know better, their lack of seriousness of purpose and self-respect is appalling. Their ability to rationalize the irrational, to themselves as well as the public, is stunning.”
Equally worrying are statements made by Trump and Vice President Vance suggesting that they don’t intend to honor court rulings against Trump’s voluminous executive orders.
Somehow Trump has managed in a little over one month in office to stir up a hornet’s nest of worry among even his presumed supporters. Bentz and other members of Congress also facing contentious meetings with constituents would be well to show some independence if they want to protect their seats.
In the meantime, some Republican leaders are saying the answer to obstreperous constituents is to simply stop holding town halls. As SNL comedian Jonathan Lovitz used to say, “Yeah, that’s the ticket”.
On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the chairman of National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), advised members to stop having in-person town halls. Without evidence, Hudson said there town halls were being dominated by hostile Democratic activists and drowning out actual constituent voices. As a less threatening option, he encouraged House Republicans to hold tele-town halls or Facebook Live events that would allow more control and allow moderators to filter questions and comments.
Donald Trump seems to have a way of picking the wrong person for the job.
OPB reported today that Vance Day, a former Marion County Circuit Court Judge, has joined the U.S. Department of Justice.
Vance Day
“I can confirm that I received an appointment to serve as ‘Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States,’” Day told OPB in an email. He began work at the Justice Department on Tuesday, Feb. 18.
The deputy attorney general is the second in command at the Justice Department and oversees an agency that includes the FBI, a sprawling federal prison system and U.S. Attorneys across the country, OPB reported.
Given Vance’s background, it’s like Jason coming back to life in the Friday the 13th franchise.
In January 2016, the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability, dealing with a 13-count complaint, found Day had violated the Oregon Code of Judicial Conduct on eight of the counts relating to his judicial and public behavior. The Commission unanimously recommended Day’s removal from the bench and filed its recommendation with the Oregon Supreme Court.
The Commission also took issue with efforts by Judge Day to tie the Commission’s actions to his refusal to perform same-sex marriages.
Day argued that he was being persecuted for his Christian beliefs. “Throughout the Commission’s prosecution of Judge Day is an open disdain and hostility towards the religious beliefs of those whose faith honors marriage between one man and one woman,” his attorneys said in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Prior to the hearing in this case, Day engaged in an organized media campaign designed to create the impression that the only reason for the investigation of his conduct is his position regarding same sex marriage,” said the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability’s Commission’s Jan. 25, 2016 Opinion. “To this end, Judge Day made repeated public assertions that he was being unfairly attacked by this investigation due solely to his religious beliefs concerning same sex marriage. Judge Day made these statements despite the fact that his position on same sex marriage was not discovered by the Commission until after the investigation was well underway. His assertions in this regard were intentionally deceptive to the public.”
On Sept. 3, 2015, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission approved an application to create a legal defense fund for Day, permitted under an Oregon law that allows public officials to create a trust fund to defray the cost of legal bills related to their duties.
Subsequently, Randall J. Adams, a Mt. Angel, OR attorney, established the Vance D. Day Legal Expense Trust Fund with Adams as its trustee. A Defend Judge Day website also went up saying Day’s defense “will likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars” and soliciting donations.
In the beginning, donations didn’t exactly roll in by the barrel. But on May 1, 2017, Eberle Associates, a Virginia-based professional direct-mail fundraising company, signed on.
By Sept. 30, 2018, fundraising revenue totaled $2,008,658.54. The whole effort seemed like quite a success story. But fundraising expenses, including $1,290,383 in payments to Eberle and $6,021.38 in payments for other related services, totaled $1,296,404.38.
In other words, Eberle chewed up 64 percent of all fundraising receipts. According to NonProfit Quarterly, “The agencies that set acceptable fundraising percentage limits say that on average an organization’s fundraising expenses throughout the year should not represent more than 35 percent of the donations raised, and most organizations come in significantly below that benchmark.” Some professional fundraisers say the best practice target should be 12-20 cent per dollar raised.
After all the fundraising payments, that left just $712,254.20 for other expenses, principally for lawyers. And there was a slew of lawyers at the trough. The two firms pulling in the most money were Hart Wagner Trial Attorney, Portland, $167,640.96, and Sherlag DeMuniz LLP, Portland, $161,827.63.
All the money, lawyers and investigators sounded pretty impressive. How could Judge Day lose with that kind of firepower?
But he did.
Despite Day’s efforts to explain and defend his behavior, the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability unanimously recommended his removal from the bench
The Oregon Supreme Court imposed a three-year suspension, without pay, on Day.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Day, leaving in place the three-year suspension against him imposed by the Oregon Supreme Court.
Criminal charges against Day were dropped, but only because a key witness declined to participate.
Day tried to salvage the whole mess by declaring, “I’m the first person to ever push back against the decades of liberal elites in Oregon government.”
Now Vance is aiming for a resurrection, I guess, with his appointment to the Department of Justice.
As with many of Trump’s cabinet appointments, the United States deserves better.
If you have a few minutes, I’d like to begin by telling you about Edwin Bell Forsythe because his service to our country and his dedication to liberty are instructive.
Forsythe was a true public servant. A devoted Quaker from Moorestown, New Jersey, he served honorably in the House of Representatives as a Republican from 1970 until his death in 1984. I worked for Forsythe and remember keenly his decency and dignity.
Rep. Edwin B. Forsythe and his wife, Mary, at the Capitol.
A continuing reminder of Forsythe is the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, NJ. The refuge includes over 32,000 acres of coastal salt meadows, uplandbrush and woodlands, and open bays and channels along the New Jersey shore.
At the dedication of that refuge, Ed Welch, Chief Counsel of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, praised Forsythe for his effective leadership, the ability to take divisive controversies and hammer out strong bipartisan compromises in an atmosphere of fairness and civility. “The policy differences between Republicans and Democrats were never ignored, but they were not permitted to obstruct the essential workings of the Committee,” Welch said.
“Ed Forsythe was a man of integrity and principle,” said Rep. William J. Hughes of New Jersey, who served as a Democratic Member of the House of Representatives from 1975 to 1995, “He represented the very best that this nation has to offer, serving quietly but tirelessly and effectively for the people of his district. There was not an ounce of pomposity or pretension in Ed Forsythe. Ed’s unfortunate death has taken from us a great legislator and a fine individual. We have all been enriched by his presence among us.”
”His sensitivity, wisdom and quiet voice of reason will be missed,” added New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean.
In today’s tumultuous political environment, “sensitivity, “wisdom and (a) quiet voice of reason” are sadly missing. Can you name even a handful of members of Congress who are spoken of with such respect today?
In their place we have rancorous, narcissistic exhibitionists focused more on messaging and publicity than on driving good public policy.
In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, a shape-shifting individual, called Mr. Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” a “kook,” “crazy” and a man who was “unfit for office.” He’s now one of Trump’s most sycophantic defenders when it suits him.
Then there’s Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Despite being a doctor, who’s obligation is “First, do no harm”, he voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has made multiple outrageous medical statements, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Even Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a supposed moderate, has lost her bearings. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee for 12 years, she voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard, a politician with a history of troubling statements and actions, to be the Director of National Intelligence, putting American security at risk.
Republican Senator Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a combat veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the face of Trump’s threat of supporting a primary competitor, voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. This despite serious allegations of personal misconduct and lack of judgement on his part, as well as minimal executive experience essential to managing a Department of Defense with about 3.4 million civilian and military personnel and an $850 billion annual budget.
The list of weak-kneed Republican members of Congress could go on as the Republican Party has fallen into the trap of slavishly bowing down to President Trump, less because they agree with his erratic pronouncements than because they fear losing their prestigious positions.
House Republicans are no better. In bowing to Trump’s will, they are consciously compromising their authority.
In the midst of all this stands Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who daily declares his fealty not to the constitution, but to an erratic, morally compromised president.
On August 7, 2015, Johnson wrote on Facebook, “The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.”
These days, don’t count on Johnson to try to put the brakes on any of Trump’s questionable autocratic moves. As Johnson told reporters in January, “There is a new sheriff in town.”
And reveling in his position at the top of the Republican hierarchy stands Donald Trump, who sees himself as a wonder of the world, comparable to the Colossus of Rhodes constructed in homage to Helios, the original god of the Sun in ancient Greek mythology.
Wishing to be unburdened by common standards of decency and respect, Trump has even tried to fire an executive branch ethics watchdog who heads the Office of Special Counsel.
With a brusque two sentence email, the White House Personnel Office leader was dismissed on Feb. 7, 2025, with little more than a “Thank you for your service”. The firing is only on hold because a federal district court issued a temporary order keeping the lawyer in office through a hearing scheduled for Feb. 26, 2025.
The behavior of senior people serving under Trump is no better. Their abandonment of civility is exemplified by “Border Czar” Tom Homan who callously said of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Feb. 17 Newsmax interview, “She’s the dumbest congresswoman ever elected to Congress and she proves that every day.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is no more reticent. A fanatical Trump devotee, he was accused by the chairman of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol of “efforts to spread false information about alleged voter fraud” and encouraging state legislatures to alter the outcome of the 2020 election by appointing alternate electors.
Considered a racist by some of his detractors, Miller was a lead author of the zero tolerance policies that led to immigrant children being separated from their parents during Trump’s first term.
“America is for Americans and Americans only” Miller bellowed at a Madison Square Garden Trump campaign rally on October 27, 2024, “With your vote, you can smash this broken establishment” he concluded.
Trump has also brought into government efforts to indiscriminately hollow out the federal civil service. Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government efficiency, or DOGE, is hacking away with abandon at multiple federal departments. Regardless of what Trump and Musk might say, the goal is not so much to diminish the federal workforce as to replace it with clones of Trump’s most rabid supporters. Meanwhile, Republicans stand idly by.
Affected agencies include the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department oi Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Aviation Administration. The IRS is also expected to lay off thousands of probationary workers in the middle of tax season.
A DOGE purge across the Department of Energy that targeted about 2,000 employees led to embarrassment and a recall when it was discovered that many of them worked on the nation’s critical nuclear weapons programs. The Associated Press noted that the firings came as the National Nuclear Security Administration “is in the midst of a major $750 billion nuclear weapons modernization effort, including new land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, new stealth bombers and new submarine-launched warheads.”
“The goal here is to dismantle the merit system and return the government to the spoils system, awarding the president who gets into office and punish people who worked for the prior administration,” Kevin Owen, a lawyer who represents federal employees in civil service and whistleblower litigation, told the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, issues of privacy and data security are arising. Democrats and tax experts are sounding alarms, for example, about a plan by Elon Musk’s DOGE team to gain access to an IRS system that contains detailed financial information about millions of taxpayers, including their tax returns.
“This is a five-alarm warning,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the IRS, said in a post on X, calling the move an “illegal and blatant power grab.”
Also raising alarms are DOGE moves at the Social Security Administration, where Elon Musk’s team, alleging unsubstantiated concerns about fraud, is reportedly attempting to access reams of sensitive information. The acting head of the SSA, Michelle King, has already resigned over the intrusion. Yet, again, elected Republicans casually ignore the threat.
And I haven’t even begun to address the international chaos emerging under Trump and his servile minions.
Nowhere is this chaos more evident than in Trump’s handing of the Ukraine war. Word of impending negotiations with Russia was, first of all, a shock to Ukraine and America’s European allies.
Then, when negotiations on the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia between the U.S. Delegation, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Russian Delegation led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, conspicuously absent were any representatives from Ukraine or Europe. The move was perceived by both as a slap in the face.
“Making sense of Trump’s plan – if there is one” read the headline of a Kyiv Independent article on the negotiations.
One thing was clear, though. “Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in address at a Munich Security Conference. “From now on, things will be different…”
On Feb.18, Trump lambasted our European allies and Ukraine for letting the war go on. “Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should’ve ended it in three years,” he said. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
On February 17, Trump went so far in a Truth Social post as to directly insult Zenenskyy , calling him “a modestly successful comedian” and ” A Dictator without Elections”.
” Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Trump wrote. ” In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do.”
“Trump sold his soul and our country to Putin,” said one commenter. “Hard to believe we’re defending Russia instead of the Ukrainian freedom fighters.
But Russia is likely thrilled by Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine as well as by Vice President Vance’s remarks critical of Europe and supportive of far-right forces on the continent.
“The Kremlin for years has sought to weaken Europe by boosting parties that Mr. Vance argued must be allowed to flourish,” reporter Paul Sonne wrote in the New York Times on February 16. “The same day as his remarks at the conference, Mr. Vance met with the leader of Germany’s extreme right movement, which is contesting national elections this month, boosting a party Russia has sought to legitimize. Moscow has also sought to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, realizing that a destruction of the longstanding Euro-Atlantic alliance from within would lead to a world where Moscow can wield far more power.”
Echoing Sonne, Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, commented online, “Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime. Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”
If Trump’s usual bull in a china shop approach to foreign affairs, complemented by his vice president, leads to the abandonment of Ukraine and a reinvigorated Russia, the risk for Europe will be great and another American threat, China, will be emboldened.
The United States has also inserted itself into a flammable situation with Trump’s proposal that the United States take control of the Gaza Strip and push the Palestinians into other countries, principally Jordan and Egypt. The land by the Mediterranean Sea is a potential French “Riviera,” something that would be worth a “long-term ownership position,” Trump said in early February. Typical of Trump, his vague proposal was an apparent surprise even to his closest advisors and stunned Congressional Republicans.
It was all reminiscent of Trump in his first term trying to convince North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un that his country was ripe for development as a popular destination spotif he gave up his militaristic nuclear weapons program. If you can believe this, Trump even showed him a slick video the White House National Security Council came up with showing what North Korea could become if it concluded a rapprochement with the United States. “They have great beaches,” Trump said.
Where are the members of Congress voicing concerns? Where is today’s Wayne Morse, a vocal critic of the Vietnam war and an outspoken defender of the Constitution’s checks and balances during his 24-year tenure in the U.S. Senate representing Oregon from1945-69?
Fariborz S. Fatemi, who worked on foreign policy issues on the staff of U.S. Sen. Frank Church, told of how Morse frequently went to the floor of the Senate to deliver riveting and informative speeches about the rule of law, separation of powers and how the Senate and the House were slowly giving their powers away to an already powerful executive.
Way back in 2018, Berry Craig, a state AFL-CIO official, saw the relevance of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, to Trump’s behavior. President Lincoln “wanted men who would tell him what he needed to win the war, save the union and put slavery on the road to extinction – not what they thought he wanted to hear,” Craig said. “It’s the opposite with Trump. He demands obsequiousness.”
That’s still true. Instead of strong, valiant, principled members standing up to Trump on myriad issues for their institution, we have toadies worried only about their next election.
That must change.
George Washington, in his 1796 farewell address, cautioned his fellow Americans about the rise of a man like Trump. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty,” he warned.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said on Fox TV about Trump’s push to control Greenland, “I met with the Danish Ambassador this past week. They said Greenland is not for sale. I said, ‘Everything is for sale.’”
We already know Marco Rubio is. He previously portrayed Trump as “a pathological liar”, a “sniveling coward” and “utterly amoral”. Now Trump’s his best buddy.
So far, the Republican Party, Republican members of Congress and obedient Republican staff seem to be for sale, too. They need to act to protect America from Trump’s lunacies.
Challenging Trump won’t be easy.
In the movie “The Apprentice”, Sebastian Stan portrays a young Donald Trump determined to make his mark in 1970s New York. Reflecting on what he saw in Trump, Stan said in a New York Times story. “What I’ve always seen in his journey, and certainly we were exploring in the film, was the solidifying of a person into stone, the loss of humanity.”
Despite his public efforts to appear amiable and open, Donald J. Trump is a cold-hearted vindictive man who will fight tooth and nail.
ThinkingOregon 