How Surprised Are You That Trump's Department Of Homeland Security Heads Are Serving Illegally?

Illegal appointment

If you're looking for the worst villains of the Trump era, your head will soon be spinning. That said, no list can possibly leave off the authors of Trump's military assault against Portland, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli. As congressional Democrats have asserted, neither is legally serving in the government. Yesterday Washington Post reporter Erica Werner wrote the Government Accountability Office has found that "Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and his deputy Kenneth Cuccinelli are serving under an invalid order of succession under the Vacancies Reform Act." Their appointments by Trump violated federal law. "The Vacancies Reform Act," she wrote, "governs how temporary appointments can be made to positions that require Senate confirmation. President Trump has repeatedly circumvented the Senate confirmation process by placing people in acting positions-- including Wolf and Cuccinelli."

GAO said it was referring the matter to the DHS inspector general for reviews, and that any further actions would be up to Congress and the IG.

Wolf was a deputy chief of staff in the Trump administration before rising through the ranks, in part because of his repeated public professions of support for Trump and his hard line views on immigration. Wolf has played a central role in the government’s controversial response to protests throughout the United States this summer, actions some former DHS officials from both parties have said crossed the line.

Cuccinelli, formerly the attorney general of Virginia, is also an immigration hard-liner who also served as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In March, a federal judge ruled that his appointment to head USCIS was illegal and that he lacked the authority to issue policy directives tightening asylum rules.

GAO noted that it was not examining the question of the consequences of Wolf and Cuccinelli’s improper appointments, or the impact on the actions they have taken in those roles, instead referring those questions to the DHS inspector general.

DHS quickly issued a statement opposing GAO’s conclusion.

“We wholeheartedly disagree with the GAO’s baseless report and plan to issue a formal response to this shortly,” DHS spokesman Nathaniel Madden said in a statement.

The GAO conducted its review in response to inquiries from House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform.

In a statement responding to GAO’s findings, Thompson and Maloney called on Wolf and Cuccinelli to resign from their roles.

“GAO’s damning opinion paints a disturbing picture of the Trump administration playing fast and loose by bypassing the Senate confirmation process to install ideologues,” Thompson and Maloney said. “In its haste to circumvent Congress’s constitutional role in confirming the government’s top officials to deliver on the president’s radical agenda, the administration violated the department’s order of succession, as required by law.”

Trump has publicly discussed his preference for having people in his administration serving in an acting capacity, saying this gives him “more flexibility.”

Trump ousted Nielsen in April 2019, and since then the White House has displayed an unprecedented disregard for the Senate confirmation process. McAleenan served seven months without a nomination, and though Trump has effusively praised Wolf, he has not received a nomination for the secretary position.

Across the department, career officials have retired or resigned from their jobs without replacement, and the White House has made no effort to push for the confirmation of its more recent appointees, despite GOP control of the senate.

The leadership page of the DHS website shows empty seats and interim appointments across the agencies charged with protecting the country from terrorist attacks and other threats, with more than 20 vacancies and acting chiefs among senior department positions.

In addition to the temporary appointments at DHS headquarters, none of the three agencies that run the country’s immigration system--U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)-- have a Senate-confirmed leader.

I frankly never really understood how the corruption-as-a-way-of-life New Jersey Democratic Party allowed a strong and effective progressive like Bonnie Watson Coleman to rise in the ranks and get all the way to Congress... but, then, Rep. Watson Coleman is a force of nature-- and now a senior member of the the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of its Subcommittee on Oversight, Management and Accountability. "DHS has been a serious problem in so many levels," she told me this morning in an informal conversation. "Can’t wait to change from the top down and looking forward to more humane policies. The Committee has called on Wolf to testify on the Portland nightmare (one of many); he declined saying we didn’t give him adequate notice. I’ve asked for him to resign. I honestly don’t see getting rid of him and or Cuccinelli until Trump is out. But we just need to keep calling them out for their lack of humanity, the chaos and disruption and their storm trooper-like actions. It’s disgusting, scary and as you know, threatens our democracy."

This is from the statement released yesterday by committee chairs Maloney and Thompson:

Has Trump Gone To War Against An American City? Does He Have Storm Troopers Gassing Peaceful Protesters? The Most Repulsive Reelection Stunt Ever Pulled

The Psychedelic Furs were always ahead of their time. The song above, lead track on the Forever Now album, was written and recorded almost four decades ago!

You have to have a party
When you're in a state like this
You can really move it all
You have to vote and change
You have to get right out of it
Like out of all this mess
You'll say yeah to anything
If you believe all this but
Don't cry, don't do anything
No lies, back in the government
No tears, party time is here again
President gas is up for president
Line up, put your kisses down
Say yeah, say yes again
Stand up, there's a head count
President gas on everything but roller skates
It's sick the price of medicine
Stand up, we'll put you on your feet again
Open up your eyes
Just to check that your asleep again
President gas is president gas again
He comes in from the left sometimes
He comes in from the right
It's so heavily advertised that he wants you and I
It's a real cowboy set, electric company
Every day is happy days
It's hell without the sin, but
Don't cry, don't do anything
No lies, back in the government
No tears, party time is here again
President gas is up for president
Line up, put your kisses down
Say yeah, say yes again
Stand up, there's a head count
President gas on everything but roller skates
It's sick the price of medicine
Stand up, we'll put you on your feet again
Open up your eyes just to check that your asleep again
President gas is president gas again
President gas
Oh, president gas
Whoa, president gas
Oh, president gas
Whoa, president gas
Oh, president gas
Whoa, president gas

On Saturday evening L.A. Times reporter Richard Read noted that "Undeterred by civil rights lawsuits and pleas from local officials to stand down, federal agents in camouflage have continued their crackdown against demonstrators in Portland, Ore., into the weekend, launching impact explosives and tear gas late Friday at downtown protesters shouting, 'Go home.' Since early in the week, agents dispatched by the Trump administration, some in unmarked vehicles, have confronted and detained activists, according to Oregon state officials, charging at least 13 with crimes related to demonstrations. One protester was hospitalized with skull fractures July 11 after a federal agent shot him in the face with a projectile. By the administration’s move to make Portland an example in a national 'law and order' initiative just months before the presidential election, the conduct of federal forces here has accomplished what weeks of strife between protesters and Oregon officials had failed to do-- uniting them, at least momentarily, in common cause."

“Every American should be repulsed when they see this happening,” state Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. “If this can happen here in Portland, it can happen anywhere.”

Rosenblum on Friday sought an injunction against federal law enforcement agencies, accusing them of seizing protesters without probable cause, pulling activists into unmarked vehicles and detaining and questioning them without basis for arrests. She said agents in Portland wore no identifying information other than the label “police” on their military fatigues.

...Trump is doing this because it plays well with the right-wing media and his political base," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in an interview Friday. "If Trump thinks he can get away with this in the Pacific Northwest, he’s going to try this elsewhere.”

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch dubbed the Trump-provoked violence in Portland Trump’s made-for-TV fascism and predicted it won't get him reelected. "As protests in Portland over police brutality and racial inequity near the end of a second month," wrote Bunch, "these heavily camouflaged, helmeted and anonymous agents have routinely fired tear gas-- even though courts have mostly banned local police from deploying it-- and projectiles at protesters near a federal building in Oregon’s largest city. And-- as captured in video or described by victims-- these agents even snatched peaceful protesters off Portland sidewalks, shoved them into unmarked vans and took them for questioning without identifying themselves or their agency. These are the kind of Kafkaesque, police-state tactics that most civilized folks hoped had gone the way of Chile’s late authoritarian (and U.S.-installed) 20th-century dictator Augusto Pinochet, only to return for the increasingly desperate and dangerous final days of Trump’s disastrous presidency and America’s descent into madness and chaos."

These hazy, tear-gas-soaked nights in the Pacific Northwest have been five years in the making-- the inevitable climax of a story line that began on a morning in June 2015 when Trump descended a gilded escalator to start building a movement of right-wing rabble with hate speech against Mexicans. You were warned in the early days of his presidency, when Trump made good on his promise to the white-supremacist unions of cops and federal border and immigration agents to “take the shackles off,” cheering on police brutality while setting the stage for agents to show up at schools and courthouses and disappear undocumented immigrants with deep roots in their communities. Those who said nothing or uttered toothless platitudes at these tactics, or the agents ripping toddlers from the arms of their parents at the Mexican border, shouldn’t be shocked by now seeing Gestapo tactics in the streets of Portland.





Indeed, Trump’s inexorable frog-in-boiling-water push toward full-on authoritarianism has been so successful that almost no attention was paid on July 1, when the government announced a program with the Orwellian name of Protecting American Communities Task Force, or PACT (apparently the “F” is silent), which had the started goal of protecting statue and monuments. But PACT’s real open-ended and ill-defined mission seems to be escalating conflict in a handful of cities, like Portland, with the most-active far-left communities.

PACT is comprised of officers from an array of agencies including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (yes, even though the Canadian border is 285 long miles away)-- whose union Twitter feed is a steady stream of pro-Trump propaganda, including diatribes against “the Radical Left”-- as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service. Under the leadership of Wolf-- a presidential lapdog who wields the powerful hammer of Homeland Security even though he’s only been confirmed as an undersecretary-- this is a “dream team” for a Trumpian secret police.

And there’s a very real chance that Pinochet-style federal policing may be coming to your hometown very soon. Acting Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (also not Senate confirmed) told NPR on Friday that “this is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country.”

Chad Wolf set the template for these unwelcome-- literally no major government official in Oregon has asked for this intervention and most have pleaded for the federales to go home-- mini-invasions when he showed up in Portland on Thursday, snubbed elected leaders but met with the head of Portland’s police union, and posted a picture on Twitter of himself rallying the troops, whoever these troops actually are. “Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch,” Wolf tweeted-- trying to make it sound like his camouflaged crusaders were ready to storm Omaha Beach rather than fire rubber bullets at graffiti vandals armed with chalk.

Has Trump offered him a preemptive pardon? Why doesn't the Senate act?

Wolf’s renegade Homeless Security army is tragic vindication for those of who’ve been warning since the early 2000s that the extensive security apparatus that America created after 9/11-- from that ominous too-1930s-Germanic sounding moniker of “Homeland Security” to the level of militarized policing unavoidable seen since George Floyd’s murder-- would be turned against U.S. citizens, especially if America ever elected a president with an authoritarian streak.

For now, though, Trump’s 21st Century fascism is mostly a political performance. Unable to run on his leadership or his record, with a mounting coronavirus death toll that just passed 140,000 and 11 percent unemployment that may get worse again before it gets better, the president is hoping to save his presidency with fear. But his desperate and misguided efforts to recreate Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign and somehow scare voters about Joe Biden won’t work unless he can bring nightly scenes of disorder and chaos into your living room.

...Yes, it’s more than a little ironic that all of this is unfolding on the very weekend that the greatest living American in the arena of civil rights, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, died at age 80 (and that we also lost another champion of democracy, the Rev. C.T. Vivian). Lewis had a complicated relationship with the type of left-wing activists leading the current protests in Portland but there’s no doubt that the late congressman-- famously beaten by both angry mobs during 1961′s Freedom Rides and by Alabama troopers near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma four years later-- would have been appalled at the government’s brutal crackdown on any form of dissent there.

“We are tired of being beaten by policemen,” Lewis said in his address to the 1963 March on Washington. “We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. ... I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

The air has been filled all weekend with political platitudes about Lewis, many of them from hypocrites who’ve devoted their political careers to fighting everything he stood for, from voting rights to basic human rights. There is so much work left undone to honor the legacy of this great man, but a simple start would be to get Trump’s tin soldiers out of Portland, today if possible.