Where are the Democrats?

The question has been repeatedly asked as Donald Trump has flooded the political landscape with Executive Orders. Well, the answer became apparent this week: they are alive and well and living in California.

Gavin Newsom, the Governor of the Great Bear State, has donned the mantle of leader of the anti-Trump brigade.

To do that he has adopted many of the same techniques of Trump himself. Michelle Obama once said: “When they hit low we hit high.” That has not worked, says Newsom. He is hitting lower and lower and lower.

Trump has called on the acolyte Republican state of Texas to gerrymander their congressional districts to give him five more seats in the House of Representatives. Newsom has threatened to gerrymander California to counter the Texas Republicans unless the redistricting plans in Texas and elsewhere are dropped.

The California governor has taken to social media to troll Donald Trump. He uses the same shoutie capital letters and boastful, self-congratulatory rhetoric as the president. He explains: “We need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done…. We have to meet fire with fire and wake up to the assault on institutions, knowledge and history.”

Trump is fighting back. When Newsom called a press conference to announce his redistricting plans, Trump sent armed ICE agents to stand in the crowd.

A US Grand Jury is involved now.

With three separate criminal referrals, the Department of Justice has launched a full-scale investigation into claims that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and CIA Director John Brennan, orchestrated an intelligence assessment that claims the Russians meddled in and backed Trump in the 2016 elections.

It is true that Obama ordered the CIA to investigate claims that Trump was backed by the Russians. They found no proof of collusion but they did report that Russia tried to influence the elections in Trump’s favour. This assessment was published shortly before Trump took office and Trump claimed that it undermined his first four year administration.

The first referral came from Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence. She claimed to have unearthed a congressional report that claimed the Russians did not support Trump and that Democrats orchestrated a false assessment. Gabbard says that this means the initial report was nothing short of “treason.”  Gabbard failed to mention that the report was written by Trump-supporting Republicans congressmen.

Referral number two was from CIA Director John Ratcliffe who stumbled across classified documents that said the report was “rushed” at the behest of Obama and others. Ratcliffe again says this proves “treason.” Ratcliffe failed to say that the report says it would have reached the same conclusion no matter how much time it took to investigate.

Finally, FBI Director Kash Patel said he uncovered a “treasonous” email from Hillary Clinton calling for a false assessment of Russian involvement. The email was old news and had already been dismissed as “fake” news.

The irony is that Obama cannot be prosecuted no matter what a Trump-convened Grand Jury decides. Thanks to the Trump-controlled Supreme Court, a sitting president cannot be held accountable in law for any act committed while president.

When it comes to law and order…

Americans vote Republican and Donald Trump. When it comes immigration control they also tend to vote Republican and Trump—or at least they did.

The antics of Trump’s heavy-handed balaclava-clad ICE (Immigration Control Enforcement) agents have resulted in polls that show 76 percent of Americans now oppose US immigration policies.

Everyone wants immigration controlled. They also want the crime statistics to fall—even when they are already on the down slope. But they do not want a police state—and that’s what they have in Washington DC at the moment. The police force is now under the direct control of the president. There are also 800 uniformed National Guard troops on street corners with armoured vehicles; another 800 FBI agents on street patrol and an undisclosed number of ICE agents.

The reason? Well, according to President Trump the nation’s capital is “overrun by violent crime and anarchy.” His dystopian picture stands in sharp contrast to the official figures which reveal a 30-year crime low. Trump himself hailed the city’s falling crime figures only three months ago.

From 1874 to 1973, Washington DC was directly governed by Congress and a three-person Board of Commissioners appointed by the president. Then came the DC Home Rule Act of 1973 which gave the District of Columbia limited home-rule with an elected mayor and council who controlled, among other things, the DC police.

Congress, however, has retained ultimate authority and the President still has emergency powers. To use those powers, Trump has to declare an emergency whether there is one or not. That is exactly what he has done. The last time such an emergency was declared in Washington DC was during the race riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968.

Legally, Trump cannot maintain the state of emergency for more than 30 days. However, he has strongly hinted that he will ignore any restrictions on his power. He has also threatened to extend the same strong-arm measures to other American cities. Washington DC is not even in the US top ten when it comes to crime statistics.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”