Mike’s Blog Round-up

“When President Joe Biden relinquishes power in January, some parts of his legacy will be secure, while others may be undone by President-elect Donald Trump and a new Republican-controlled Congress,” NBC News reports. “The pieces of Biden’s legacy go into four buckets. Trump can easily undo executive actions on matters like immigration and transgender rights, while a Republican Congress can unravel spending programs passed by Democrats on a partisan basis.

Elaine Godfrey: “Gaetz has always sought political relevance and power. Dismissed by many, including GOP colleagues, as a self-promoter, Gaetz’s superpower has been understanding far more clearly than they do how power works in the Trumposphere. And that insight has enabled him to become consigliere to the former and soon-to-be president.” Said Democratic consultant Steve Schale: “For all the things people say about Gaetz that are true, the one thing about Matt that people don’t fully respect is that the guy is not an idiot.” “Now is when Gaetz’s hard work starts to pay off—even if the Senate declines to confirm him.”

John Burn-Murdoch: “In April 2022, Elon Musk tweeted a cartoon made by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright. The image shows a stick figure representing Wright, a self-described ‘center-left liberal’, becoming politically stranded as the American left shifts ever further leftward during the 2010s, leaving him closer to the right despite his ideology not changing.

Franklin Foer: “The U. S. government is more than an array of marble buildings. It’s an aggregation of expertise, a collection of individuals who have inherited an ethos and a set of practices handed down through the decades. Ever since Trump’s second victory last week, these long-standing denizens of the bureaucracy, a tier of career employees who occupy their job regardless of the partisan affiliation of the president, have mulled leaving the government.” “How could they not?

Speaker Mike Johnson said on Friday that he does not think the House Ethics Committee report on allegations related to Matt Gaetz should be released and is “going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report,” CNN reports.

“President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead powerful U. S. spy agencies has often seemed to embrace Washington’s adversaries and questioned key American intelligence judgments, raising alarm among veteran intelligence officials and the wider national-security establishment,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “If confirmed as director of national intelligence, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii would hold a post whose extensive powers include briefing the president on the most sensitive U.