Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025]( Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control. Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control. - [Why the EU cannot admit Ukraine as a member]( Why the EU cannot admit Ukraine as a member, Wolfgang Münchau, The New Statesman For the past ten years the EU has been trying to increase its powers through the back door. It has been using novel legal instruments to make up for the lack of a right to raise taxes and issue debt. My favourite example was a €300bn-plus investment plan, first proposed in 2014 by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission. It ended up mostly as a reclassification of existing investments, with an EU label stuck on them. A more recent example of the gulf between lofty ambitions and financial reality was the recovery fund, agreed in 2020 after the start of the pandemic. This time it was real money – again, well over €300bn in grants. I can’t count the number of commentators who rushed to declare that this was the EU’s Hamiltonian moment – the beginnings of an EU fiscal union. But it was not to be. The EU still relied on its members to guarantee the debt. The financial markets saw right through it. EU debt now trades at a premium interest rate compared with that of its member states. This was not supposed to happen. You cannot fudge your way into geopolitical leadership in this manner. For that you need real money. It would also require a constitutional treaty to establish a fiscal union – the EU as it is constituted today cannot act as a global power, or even deliver economic stimulus. It can still run a successful single market or customs union. It can regulate markets. But it cannot do what it really wants to do – become a geopolitical actor, a force for freedom, and a leader in green energy. Or, for that matter, accept Ukraine as a member state. - [It’s brutal around here: Daily Kos revenue is down. Thank goodness for small donors like you, who have never let us down. Please chip in $5 today to keep us fighting Republicans.]( - [Why We Should Politicize the Weather]( Why We Should Politicize the Weather, Paul Krugman, The New York Times But we absolutely should politicize the weather. In practice, environmental policy probably won’t be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will mainly turn on the economy and social issues. Still, we’re living in a time of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party — it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world — would, in a more rational political debate, be the biggest election issue of them all. First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, yet we’ve already seen multiple weather events that would have been shocking not long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have been striking one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks, with no end in sight. Residents of Florida might be tempted to take a cooling dip in the ocean — but ocean temperatures off South Florida have come close to 100 degrees, not much below the temperature in a hot tub. - [The US needs a new system for declaring natural disasters and distributing federal aid]( The US needs a new system for declaring natural disasters and distributing federal aid, Carolyn Kousky, Karina French, Carlos Martin, and Manann Donoghoe, Brookings A formal trigger for federal involvement in a regional hazard event is reasonable and warranted. But the declaration process created decades ago has produced several unintended consequences: The number of federally declared disasters has increased significantly since the Stafford Act’s passage in 1988, driven by several trends beyond objectively measured damages. The largest number of declarations was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the president issued declarations across the country. There was also an outsized number of declarations in 2011—a year with a string of catastrophes including wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding. The rising number of declarations is driven not only by changing hazard frequency and continued development in high-risk areas, but also shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery. This includes different forms of political bias driving governors and presidential administrations’ decisionmaking process, and differences in state governments’ capacity and experience navigating the declaration process. While there are a few examples of declarations being denied for political ends, the overall trend has been in favor of more declarations. - [Stay cool this summer with a Daily Kos t-shirt. Get yours now!]( - [The Death Penalty on Trial in Louisiana]( The Death Penalty on Trial in Louisiana, Piper French, Bolts Magazine Clemency is often conceived of as a discrete and individual mercy—as an exception, the opposite of policy. On death row, we picture it as an eleventh-hour decision to spare a person’s life following efforts by advocates to highlight the tragic or unjust circumstances of their case. But here, the petitioners say that in highlighting people’s stories, they’re not trying to persuade public officials to handpick which of the 57 is most deserving of mercy. [...] The U.S. Supreme Court has declared that executing someone with an intellectual disability is unconstitutional, a criterion that fits 40 percent of the people on Louisiana’s death row. Thirty-nine of the 57 have been diagnosed with brain damage or serious mental illness. Three quarters are people of color, the vast majority of them Black. Many allege prosecutorial misconduct and sorely deficient legal support. “We are executing the most vulnerable people in our population,” said Calvin Duncan, an exoneree who served as a jailhouse lawyer to many on death row for about 19 of the 28 years he spent wrongfully locked up. Time is running out. Edwards leaves office in early January, and the frontrunner to succeed him staunchly supports the death penalty. The next few months will determine whether Edwards translates his philosophical opposition to capital punishment into action by trying to speed up the process and by commuting every death sentence he can before his term is up. - [An Arctic ‘Great Game’ as NATO allies and Russia face off in far north]( An Arctic ‘Great Game’ as NATO allies and Russia face off in far north, Emily Rauhala, The Washington Post For several years now, European and U.S. security and intelligence officials have been keeping a closer eye on the world above the Arctic Circle, knowing that melting polar ice will open new trade routes, propel a race for natural resources and reshape global security. Western officials watched as Russia revived Soviet-era military sites and while China planned a “Polar Silk Road.” But the war in Ukraine and the dramatic deterioration of Western relations with Moscow have put the frostbitten borderlands between Norway and Russia on heightened alert, while increasing the geostrategic importance of the Arctic. The result is an uptick in military, diplomatic and intelligence interest that could usher in an iteration of the “Great Game,” the 19th-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires for influence in Asia. For Russia, because the war in Ukraine has diminished Moscow’s conventional military forces and hobbled the Russian economy, its Arctic assets have become more critical. “The Arctic has become more important because the nukes are more important,” said Maj. Gen. Lars Sivert Lervik, the chief of the Norwegian army. - [Why the EU cannot admit Ukraine as a member]( Why the EU cannot admit Ukraine as a member, Wolfgang Münchau, The New Statesman For the past ten years the EU has been trying to increase its powers through the back door. It has been using novel legal instruments to make up for the lack of a right to raise taxes and issue debt. My favourite example was a €300bn-plus investment plan, first proposed in 2014 by Jean-Claude Juncker, the former president of the European Commission. It ended up mostly as a reclassification of existing investments, with an EU label stuck on them. A more recent example of the gulf between lofty ambitions and financial reality was the recovery fund, agreed in 2020 after the start of the pandemic. This time it was real money – again, well over €300bn in grants. I can’t count the number of commentators who rushed to declare that this was the EU’s Hamiltonian moment – the beginnings of an EU fiscal union. But it was not to be. The EU still relied on its members to guarantee the debt. The financial markets saw right through it. EU debt now trades at a premium interest rate compared with that of its member states. This was not supposed to happen. You cannot fudge your way into geopolitical leadership in this manner. For that you need real money. It would also require a constitutional treaty to establish a fiscal union – the EU as it is constituted today cannot act as a global power, or even deliver economic stimulus. It can still run a successful single market or customs union. It can regulate markets. But it cannot do what it really wants to do – become a geopolitical actor, a force for freedom, and a leader in green energy. Or, for that matter, accept Ukraine as a member state. 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