Feeling broken

Turns out that Sally Yates openly defying the Trump Administration did not come out of nowhere.

The Washington Post reports that she and her office briefed the White House on Jan. 26 about the conversations between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador. Why was nothing done?  Well:

The White House Counsel's Office conducted a “review” of the legal issues and determined that “there was not a legal issue but rather a trust issue,” Spicer said.

So, Donald Trump, having been briefed by the Acting Attorney General that Flynn had engaged in illegal activity, determined that this wasn't a legal issue.  It's a trust issue.  Can he really trust Flynn after misleading Mike Pence?  Oh, come now, we've all mislead Mike Pence at some point.  Why do women keep trying to tell me what I can and cannot do?

Four days later, Yates said that she could not defend the Muslim ban.  Openly.  Since her previous attempt to work the chain of command failed.  She was fired.

This story has broken me.  I think I hit my limit.

Mean People

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017

So, that happened. How big does your ego have to be to believe that anything bad said about you can't be true?  Is the entire world supposed to be some kind of safe space for the President?

I heard that Mr. Trump did not really understand what the job of President was, even after he was elected.  If this had been an election centered around policy, then there is the ability to criticize the policies without criticizing the person. But that was never how Trump operated, so when people don't approve of the job he's doing, how else is he going to take this except as an attack on his person?

If you need me, I'll be drinking.

Dumb Executive Order #1: Repeal Obamacare

Tracking the executive orders and memos of Donald J. Trump, and how you know that no expert actually looked at them before he signed them, Part I:

Executive Order Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Pending Repeal, Signed January 20, 2017.

You know this one has to be good, because the title includes "Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection", which if you take out the "the", really gets at the heart of the order - protecting patients imposes an economic burden on somebody, but it's not the patients.

Section 1 - the confusing part here is that it really doesn't do anything.  The President can't just repeal a law that Congress passed.  It's like the Constitution is still a thing.  Instead, we want the healthcare markets to be more competitive!  Yeah!!!!  Free market!!!!  ...except for that pesky ethics problem and known market failure in the health care market.  There's no access to perfect information in setting a price, mostly because in order to do this, doctors and patients need to know how much someone is willing to pay for an operation that will save their life.  Is open heart surgery worth $5,000?  $10,000?  $100,000?  That's unfettered capitalism, and I doubt people really want to be thinking about their doctors as maximizing profits when they decide whether or not to treat their cancer.  So, yeah... rhetoric sounds great to the Austrian Economist, but that's just about it.

Section 2 - this asks the Sec. of Health and Human Services (who isn't confirmed yet) not to impose fiscal burdens on States, individuals, or families (aw...).  Or health insurance companies, or medical device companies, pharmaceutical companies (less aw...).  Except that there is that pesky law out there.

Sections 3-4 - Flexibility!  States Rights!  Except that this is in regards to a Federal tax dollar spending, so really?  It also encourages interstate insurance markets, which might be okay, except that the ACA guidelines for minimum coverage levels will be gone.  So, everyone can purchase the health care quality guaranteed by Mississippi!

Section 5 - Oh yeah.  There is that comment period on regulations.

Section 6 - Laws exist.

So what does this do?  Not a damned thing. Congress is trying to figure out a replacement, but yeah, changing the ACA is going to be a mess, mostly because people like some aspects of the law.  We'll see what the Republicans come up with. Stay tuned!

Bad Negotiation Tactics

As I'm writing this, the Muslim Ban (call a duck a duck) is currently not being enforced due to a court denial of a brief submitted by the Trump Administration to reinstate the ban immediately.

Now, I'm no lawyer (and no law school debt to go with it!), but I did study negotiation and conflict resolution in grad school, and the argument in the brief is befuddling. The brief states that "The injunction contravenes the separation of powers; harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the nation's elected representative responsible for immigration matters and foreign affairs; and second-guesses the President's national security judgment..." Putting aside the elected representative issue, note how the argument is built - there is a separation of powers, so a judge telling the President what to due isn't fair.

And, this is submitted to a judge.

When constructing an argument, you need to think about the audience that you are presenting this to.  Noel Francisco is the acting solicitor general, who has a bio on the Federalist Society website, so I'll assume at some point he read Marbury v. Madison and heard that judicial review is a thing. Separation of powers is a great place to start, but not for Trump. Unilateral action by one branch is checked by the other two, including the United States Senate having a role to play in foreign affairs. Calling the injunction "second-guessing" of the executive by the judiciary negates the role of the separation of powers.  And what judge is going to agree with this?

Noel Francisco attended the University of Chicago Law School.  Strangely, he was attending school while Barack Obama was teaching Constitutional Law, but it appears that he didn't learn anything there.  It's especially embarrassing, since he seems to have written a brief that would make Trump happy, but without any knowledge of negotiation tactics.  Like, crafting an argument to appeal to the audience, not for one's master.

Letting A Lie Fester

I assumed that Trump's college transcript had been released at some point.  I assumed wrongly.  What I did find was a number of articles mentioning that when Trump was first starting out, he allowed the media to print that he graduated top in his class in Wharton without correcting them.  For some reason, he was not as interested in perceived media lies then as he is now.

It did make me wonder, if not Trump, then who did graduate at the top of the class at Wharton in 1968?  That program had to exist somewhere, right?  Of course it does!  We have the internet!

The program is really a rather interesting document in how far American education has come since the 1960s, when the Liberal Arts Colleges were segregated by gender, and it took longer than I thought to find a woman graduating from the engineering school.  But, starting on page 19, the graduates of Wharton are enumerated, and somewhere between Cecil Jay Olmstead III and William Frederick Uhlhorn Jr, you'll find Donald John Trump in the program receiving a BS in economics.  Prize recipients for Wharton begin on page 60, where you will not find his name listed.  You will also not find his name listed on page 66, where the academic honors are listed (including Cecil - seriously, I only picked it because it sounded SO Waspy, but he graduated cum laude).  What you will find are the two who graduated magna cum laude: Joel Martin Martel and Judith Ann Mike.

So, Trump lost to a girl.  Makes sense, right?  If you are that obsessed with being the best, this has to rub you the wrong way.

More than anything, I wonder what it must have been like for her.  One of a handful of women in the college, studying accounting. And not just keeping up with the men, but excelling beyond them.  I wonder what life had in store for her, and I'd be interested in knowing more about what I perceive to have been a struggle, without knowing for certain that it was.

And, what it was like to have someone co-opt the designation that you had worked for, without any respect for the struggle, hard work, and dedication it took to achieve it.

Rules for Political Engagement

I honestly have no idea if the White House has any cohesive plan for "Making America Great Again."  When you see them rolling back George W. Bush regulations, you kind of know that there is no overarching political philosophy on the purpose of government guiding decisions.  I also know that these actions are making me mad.  I'm not an angry person, generally, and being in a constant state of agitation is really starting to wear me down.

So, with this in mind, I'm trying to stay away from political labels, and look towards the actions and inactions of elected officials.  I also know that I need to find something to do that is more in keeping with my personality so that this action can be sustainable.  Doing nothing is not an option.

My assets are my big-ass Ivy-League educated brain and overwhelming Midwestern politeness.  Name calling as an argument is not a genuine option for me, so I can't play in the Trump / Spicer / Conway field.  What I can do is write researched and reasonable economic analysis of policy.  I can also write Thank You notes to those politicians who take public stands in favor of civil rights and upholding the Constitution. (Which has led to trying to find an address for Dick Cheney to write him a nice letter - that's how fucked up this whole situation is.)

The only limitation is that I need to distance my own personal opinions from those of my employer, so I really have limited hours to do these things. And, if my employer pays for my transit, can I draft a policy paper on the train even when I'm off the clock?  I'm going to have to err on the side of caution, but that still gives me about an hour each work day and the weekends to do things, and Blogger lets me choose a publication date so I can have these post automatically.

I have no idea if this will be effective, but if I lower my expectations to just making myself feel better about my own actions, then maybe this will work.  I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with this either, but it is better than doing nothing, and better than just shouting into Facebook that I'm angry all the time.