Power Grab
Page 7
We had a strong and legitimate rationale for funding the military. Democrats had no corresponding rationale for increasing domestic spending. Pelosi even went so far as to tell CNN’s State of the Union, “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that.”
Hogwash. They just want more government. We were already spending at the time more than $1 trillion a year on more than eighty federal welfare programs, according to a December 2012 Senate Budget Committee report. The people living at or below the poverty level already qualify for these programs.
Bypassing Congress to Fund Nonprofit Allies
The cuts to domestic spending during those years may have given rise to what the Wall Street Journal called “one of the Obama Administration’s worst practices”—the misuse of settlement slush funds. Unbeknownst to Congress, the Eric Holder–led Justice Department initiated a program in which federal prosecutors could require big companies to settle federal fines by giving money to nonprofit organizations. These mandatory settlements often involved large financial institutions giving money to politically favored causes completely unrelated to their industry.
According to internal Justice Department documents exposed by former Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, government officials were directly involved in choosing which organizations would receive settlement money, and even intervened at times to prevent money from going to politically disfavored nonprofits.
In what Goodlatte called a “smoking gun” email, one senior Justice Department official appeared to intervene in a settlement with Citigroup, expressing concerns that a conservative group might be a beneficiary. The email provides proof of political bias. In it, the senior official outlines political objections to a proposed settlement agreement. “Concerns include: a) not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation (does conservative property-rights legal services).” Writing under the title of “Acting Senior Counselor for Access to Justice,” the official added that “we are more likely to get the right result from a state bar association affiliated entity.” The right result? Exactly what results are DOJ officials hoping to receive from nonprofit entities?
The DOJ apparently directed nearly $1 billion to handpicked nonprofits during a two-year period, according to a subsequent probe by the House Judiciary and House Finance Committees. The probe also turned up documents suggesting that outside groups began to lobby the DOJ to be included in these settlement agreements. One document recorded a meeting in which an outside group urged the DOJ to make donations “mandatory in all future settlements” of mortgage-lending cases.
When Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions closed the DOJ’s Access to Justice (A2J) office and ended the settlement slush funds in 2017, congressional Democrats and outside groups bemoaned the closure of a program “dedicated to making legal aid accessible to all.”
Goodlatte responded in a Hill op-ed correcting the misinformation:
Due to an investigation by the House and Senate Judiciary committees, it was discovered that the A2J office was responsible for a terrible abuse of power. In just two years, the Justice Department—thanks to suggestions from A2J—directed nearly a billion dollars in settlement funds away from victims and gave them to their preferred third-party organizations instead. These settlements provisions were designed to funnel money to political allies. The Spending Power is one of Congress’s most effective tools in reining in the Executive Branch and ensures that elected officials are accountable for how taxpayer money is spent. Sadly, unelected A2J officials, working with then–Assistant Attorney General Tony West, circumvented this Constitutional requirement by forcing settling defendants to donate money to third-party groups chosen by DOJ. In some cases, DOJ used settlements to reinstate funding to groups that Congress had specifically cut.
Money that should have gone to the federal Treasury to be appropriated by Congress was instead diverted to Democratic allies. In reversing the program, Sessions issued a memo that read “When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people—not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power. Unfortunately, in recent years the Department of Justice has sometimes required or encouraged defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement. With this directive, we are ending this practice and ensuring that settlement funds are only used to compensate victims, redress harm, and punish and deter unlawful conduct.”
The House Judiciary Committee, under its new chairman Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, is determined to reinstate the settlement slush funds. In a fact sheet on the committee’s website, committee Democrats argue that “a broad coalition of public-interest organizations oppose the bill.” Among those public interest organizations? US PIRG—a sister organization to Grassroots Campaigns Inc.—and a host of left-leaning nonprofits that would no doubt hope to be future recipients of settlement fund largesse.
Trump Changes Everything
The story told by the 990 forms of progressive nonprofits is incomplete. Only three years of data is available at any one time. We only had data through 2016 at the time this book went to press. We can see the trend that began in 2013, but much of this story remains to be written.
The end of 2016 marked the beginning of what these progressive groups consider to be an existential threat—the presidency of Donald Trump. What might they be willing to do in the face of an election result they believe to have been illegitimate? What role did nonprofits play in the 2018 midterms? What are they doing in the run-up to 2020? We don’t have 990 forms to answer those questions yet, but we will continue to see the work of nonprofits show up as we explore the progressive response to the Trump presidency.
One thing is clear: the nonprofit sector seems to have become weaponized in the service of one political party. We can predict where this trend will take us. More anger will be needed to drive more donations. More polarization will be required to drive that anger. More resistance in an attempt to attract more votes, all in the pursuit of more power. Should this effort prove successful, conservatives will need every constitutional tool at our disposal to protect the institutions we revere. Fortunately, we have a Constitution equal to the task.
But make no mistake, our Constitution is under attack. Democratic hysteria is reaching a fever pitch.
Chapter 3
The Real Authoritarians
Fascist. That is a word we have heard over and over again from terrified liberals who believed the 2016 election signaled the end of American life as we know it. The presidency of Donald Trump made Blue America apoplectic with rage and fear. Over-the-top reactions have flourished everywhere on social media and in news reports since the moment he became the Republican nominee. The forces opposing President Trump were looking to reverse what they saw as the disastrous outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
In the months between the election and the inauguration, while I was still serving as the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, some groups (probably nonprofit advocacy groups) saw that committee as one tool to make it happen. They promptly messaged their grass roots to call and demand investigations of the president-elect.
I don’t know that firsthand—I just know that when you get hundreds of phone calls all using the exact same words in the exact same order to demand the exact same thing, there’s probably an advocacy group involved somewhere. I had the authority to investigate the president-elect in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic defeat. Reporters who had ignored our substantive investigations of the Obama administration for years suddenly came out of the woodwork to inquire about even the most far-fetched or benign allegations against Donald Trump.
The calls pouring in from the public included dire warnings about the “authoritarian” or “fascist” America had just elected. Over and over again those two words came up—authori
tarian, fascist. Believing those words were accurate, Democrats demanded Congress intervene to prevent this man from being sworn in as president.
They weren’t accurate. A common definition of an authoritarian is someone who enforces strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. That’s a serious charge. The definition of fascism is more flexible, but the textbook definition of fascism is a system characterized by the following: centralization of authority, dictatorship, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
It’s hard to see how a philosophy of smaller government, deregulation, federalism, and tax cuts can be depicted as aligning with a fascist agenda. Many of the allegations against President Trump hinged on the nationalism component of the definition. Because Trump had an America-first agenda and campaigned on border security, that allegedly made him a racist xenophobe.
What did Blue America most fear a President Donald Trump would do? Believe it or not, the most common warnings from callers to my office predicted that he would curtail the freedoms of LGBTQ people and people of color. The callers we heard from were also certain he would use the power of government to take out his political enemies (particularly Hillary Clinton), feather his own nest, destroy our free press, crash our economy, and take us into needless wars.
To date, none of that has happened. The predictions were not even remotely close to the truth. Though President Trump undeniably makes comments that are construed by leftists as nationalistic (as when he prioritizes illegal immigration and putting America first), those comments align with the views of many past presidents from both parties. He has not in fact governed like a fascist at all. In fact, President Trump has done more or less the exact opposite of most of the things fearmongers told us we should be worried about.
Whatever a person may think of Donald Trump’s personality, weighing his results against the presumed agenda of a fascist dictator reveals few similarities. Law-abiding Americans have not had their freedom curtailed under this president. To the contrary, the forces of oppressive government have been lightened. On the other hand, Democrats have promoted an agenda heavy on force, willingly exacting a price in personal freedom.
As for the LGTBQ community, their freedoms remain intact under a Trump presidency. Some LGBTQ activist groups would certainly prefer someone who, like President Obama, puts more restrictions on the freedom of those who disagree with them. They would like more Obama-era restrictions on vulnerable women who don’t want to be forced to share public bathrooms with transgender women. They would prefer restrictions against health-care workers with a religious objection to performing sex reassignment surgery. But those policies do not restrict freedom of LGBTQ people—they protect the freedoms of others. Furthermore, we have to acknowledge the work of this administration to decriminalize homosexuality in seventy-one countries. The U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, the highest-ranking openly gay official in the history of Republican administrations, leads the global effort.
Much to the chagrin of some Republicans, Trump hasn’t reflexively targeted and jailed his political adversaries, even when his administration could have justifiably done so. Nor has he pardoned political allies who have been charged with criminal offenses. He didn’t use his authority to put a stop to the special counsel investigation, instead providing extensive access to privileged documents needed to reach an accurate conclusion. It’s possible we will yet see prosecutions and pardons, but given the level of evidence coming forward regarding the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, and disparate treatment of Clinton operatives and Trump operatives by the Justice Department, those investigations are warranted.
Far from feathering his own nest, President Trump has donated his salary each quarter, taking just one dollar a year in pay. He may be seeing an uptick in the number of people who patronize businesses that bear his name, much as President Obama saw an uptick in sales of his books during his administration. But there is no evidence to suggest Donald Trump has cashed in on his presidency.
Where is this fascism we were told to expect? If we use freedom and force as our metric, whose freedom has been restricted by this presidency? Perhaps drug cartels, human traffickers, and coyotes could make such an argument. But their increasing presence in this country impinges on the freedoms of every American. Too many of the people crossing our borders illegally have criminal histories or are engaged in criminal enterprises. Settling criminals in our communities does not make us more free.
The media continues to gleefully bash the man and his administration without restraint, so it’s difficult to make a case for suppression of speech unless you consider Trump’s insults and name-calling a serious threat to the First Amendment. Some people do. But where have those threats been followed up by any actual restriction of freedom or imposition of force?
There are disturbing threats to free speech in this country, but they are not coming from President Trump. They are being imposed by college faculties, social media giants, internet browsers, and activist mobs. They are even embedded in House-sponsored legislation promoted by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
We are enjoying the strongest economy in decades, complete with record low unemployment and strong wage growth. Progressives may argue that presidents don’t get credit for good economies, but these are the same people who warned that Trump would be the one to crash the economy if we allowed him to be sworn in.
Perhaps the most obvious contrast between the predictions about a Trump presidency and the reality of it is in foreign policy. This president is extracting us from war zones, not entering them. Far from instigating new wars, Trump is preparing to exit Syria and Afghanistan, going to great lengths to facilitate peace with longtime enemy North Korea, and cutting off the Obama administration’s financial support of Iranian terror operations. Arguably there is potential for U.S. military involvement in Venezuela, but the administration’s support of grassroots regime change efforts in that country have thus far yielded more successes and fewer risks than President Obama’s failed Arab Spring strategy. That disastrous policy destabilized Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain.
I suppose one could argue that President Trump is taking advantage of centralized power—but he does so in the same way that President Obama did before him. And unlike the Obama administration, this administration has also restrained the power of the federal government through massive deregulation, federal income tax cuts, and policies empowering states. For example, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act used force to require states to expand Medicaid while giving them no flexibility to defend their budgets against proliferating health-care populations and costs. Fortunately a Supreme Court ruling restored freedom to states to opt out of the program. Recently the Trump administration approved a waiver for my state that will enable Utah to provide expanded health-care coverage and still maintain control of costs. Honoring the freedom of states to innovate and the flexibility to revise federal programs is not fascism. It is not force. It is an expansion of freedom that enables states to experiment with real solutions without risking their ability to educate their kids, invest in infrastructure, or provide other programs and services.
President Trump’s emphasis on border security has also been used to paint him as a fascist. His policies have been interpreted by leftists as some kind of nationalist bigotry, but the policies he has espoused would have had the full support of Democrats just ten years ago. No one thought them fascist back then, because these policies hardly fit the textbook definition of an authoritarian or fascist regime.
So where did people get the idea that President Trump was going to be a fascist authoritarian? Let’s look back at what we were all reading about in 2016.
Is Donald Trump a Fascist? An Expert Weighs In, Slate, 2/10/2016
Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Fantasies, Reason, 2/29/16
Trump’s Totalitarian Instincts, RedState, 2/27/16
George Clooney: Donald Trump is a “Fascist,” Variety, 3/3/16
Trump: The authoritarian’s candidate of choice, Washington Post, 3/4/16
Trump: The American Fascist, BillMoyers.com, 3/11/2016
Trump’s not Hitler, he’s Mussolini, Salon, 3/12/16
The rise of American authoritarianism, Vox, 3/1/16
Is Donald Trump actually a fascist? Toronto Star, 4/3/16
Donald Trump and the Authoritarian Temptation, The Atlantic, 5/3/16
Here’s How Donald Trump’s Authoritarianism Would Actually Work, New York Magazine, 5/13/16
Eclectic Extremist: Donald Trump’s distinctly American authoritarianism draws equally from the wacko right and wacko left, Slate, 5/13/16
This is how fascism comes to America, Washington Post, 5/18/16
I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here’s what they said, Vox, 5/19/16
Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate over Global Fascism, New York Times, 5/28/16
Yes, a Trump Presidency Would Bring Fascism to America, Forbes, 5/31/16
Fascism is rising in the U.S. and Europe—and Donald Trump is the face of this disturbing new reality, Salon, 6/12/16
Is Donald Trump an Actual Fascist? Vanity Fair, 6/14/2016
The F-Word: Donald Trump and concerns about fascism, National Review, 6/20/16
Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Newsweek, 7/07/15
What Would Trump Fascism Look Like? Ten Traits, Daily Kos, 7/10/16
An American Authoritarian, The Atlantic, 8/10/2016
Is Donald Trump a fascist? The New Republic, 9/30/16
Is Trump an Ur-Fascist? The Atlantic, 10/5/2016