Defund Trump's Repression Machine

It seems I'm now not the only one calling for Senate Dems to shut down the federal government to end the money flow for Trump's domestic political repression ops. Welcome to the fight, Ezra Klein.

I've spent months making the case that the only remaining peaceful way to end Trump's domestic political repression operations via federal agents and Red state National Guard (NG) personnel was to let federal appropriations lapse as of 12:01am on October 1. In a lengthy column on Sunday, commentator Ezra Klein made his own argument for a shutdown. Sort of.

After running through the recent history of why Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) arguments against a shutdown back in March are no longer valid, Klein says this:

I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.

Many paragraphs later, Klein undermines his own argument:

I’m not going to tell you I am absolutely sure Democrats should shut the government down. I’m not. At the same time, joining Republicans to fund this government is worse than failing at opposition. It’s complicity.

That Trump and those in his immediate orbit are corrupt is self-evident. But Trump is not "corrupting" the federal bureaucracy. He's doing something far worse--turning it into an instrument of state sponsored repression that is being used against the powerless (immigrants, legal and illegal) and his political opponents (academia, law firms, and Democrats generally). And the GOP controlled House and Senate are cheering him on instead of stopping him as their constitutional oath requires.

Not since the Federalists controlled the White House and Congress at the end of the 18th century have we seen this kind of systematized, lock-step domestic political repression perpetrated in unison by the political branches of our government. Political extinction was the price the Federalists ultimately paid for their crimes against the Constitution and the Republic. But the authoritarian impulse they chose to indulge in was not itself stamped out.

As I noted in my latest book published earlier this year, past episodes of federal government repression by Republican and Democratic Party administrations and Congresses in the 20th century generally had a connection to what was perceived at the time as a major foreign threat trying to gain a political foothold here.

In the early 1900s, it was anarchism. In the immediate post-WW I era, it was communism. The rise of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s let to domestic political witch hunts for Nazi fellow travelers. In the post WW II era, it was a revived and amplified fear of Soviet communism that led to domestic political repression orchestrated by Democrats like Harry Truman and Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower.

The federal government "loyalty" program, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Eisenhower's blessing of the FBI's now-infamous Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)--these and other laws and bureaucratic instrumentalities were designed to ferret out the Reds among us, real or imagined. The results were invariably the same: constitutional rights violations at scale that were seldom ever redressed, and those responsible for the violations only held accountable by the verdict of history.

They were certainly not held accountable by federal courts, which created legal constructs like "deference to the executive" and the "state secrets privilege" that have no basis in the Constitution's text and which have allowed unconstitutional surveillance and political repression operations to flourish behind a wall of secrecy.

Once these Executive branch unconstitutional atrocities were finally publicly examined in the period of the early- to mid-1970s, Congress enacted a series of reforms to try to prevent a repeat of those abuses. The Inspector General Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of dedicated House and Senate Intelligence committees were all supposed to prevent mass surveillance and political repression by future presidents.

Years before Donald Trump came along, each of those reforms had long since failed.

Inspector general reports on federal agency or department overreach only mattered if they were acted upon and resulted in real punishment for the guilty; they seldom did.

As has been amply documented by me and a literal host of civil liberties organizations over the last quarter-century, FISA has been used to spy on Americans' communications at scale, with no legal or political consequences for those violating the law.

And instead of being the overseers and restrainers of the Executive branch and the multiple U.S. intelligence agencies they are charged with monitoring, the House and Senate intelligence committees have become their cheerleaders and protectors.

Trump's neutering of the remaining Inspectors General, his wholesale obliteration of the senior leadership at multiple federal agencies and departments, his pretextual call ups of Red state NG personnel and deploying those troops to Blue cities--these and other Trump authoritarian acts have all been made possible by the failure of successive Congresses and federal courts to stop previous presidential power grabs or harshly punish those Executive branch officials who perpetrated violations of Americans' rights. The result is the Trumpist authoritarianism that is our current daily reality.

And it’s a failure to recognize this history that causes Klein to lapse into a rather pathetic plea that "There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family."

Federal courts have now made sure that any chief executive's control over federal personnel is essentially absolute, rendering Klein's proposal nonsensical.

As I've observed before, a government shutdown--through the 2026 midterms if necessary--is the only meaningful leverage Senate Democrats have for peacefully ending warrantless ICE raids and renditions, the politicized deployment of Red state NG troops in Blue cities, and Trump's lawfare against individuals and institutions. If Senate Democrats refuse to do so, they will be responsible for the fall of the Republic and an inevitable descent into civil war.

REMINDER: You can get 30% off my new book about past episodes of unconstitutional surveillance and political repression, the Triumph of Fear, by going directly to the Georgetown University Press website and using the code TGUF...and this code can be used by anybody, so spread the word and thanks for being a Sentinel subscriber!