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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

While I doubt it will give us any joy on this issue, Trump's presidency will be a failure unless he successfully takes on the Uniparty establishment that operates, or rather not, like this.

I don't think his vanity will allow him to fail without making a really serious and ongoing effort, and those who deny his effectiveness and ability are by and large those who claimed he'd never get win nomination or the election.

So, my advise is don't despair quite yet. Heck, perhaps wait until 2018 to see if he doesn't run a campaign against a "Do Nothing Congress" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress). Aside from Reince Priebus and that part of the RNC which followed Priebus, he owes the political establishment nothing.

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Which cabinet nomination have you heard that gives you a belief that's going to happen? Outside of his "drain the swamp" rhetoric, what specific announcement/pre-announcement has he made to back your claims?

So far I've seen all of his cabinet picks going to "establishment" folks, and his supreme court nomination is supposedly going to be based solely on abortion, with no thought whatsoever given to citizen united (you know, the one thing he could actually do to start getting money back out of politics).

The exiling of Chris Christie from a position of responsibility in the transition team, and the termination of many (or all?) of his people on the transition team. That was very much a drain the swamp thing. So are the various bans on lobbyists/lobbying for some years after holding a position.

Putting Sessions' top dog or thereabouts in operational charge of the transition team. See the next item for why this isn't an establishment pick.

Nominating Sessions as AG; his position on immigration alone puts him way outside the establishment.

His Education Secretary, not so much or at all, I'll admit. But I'm in the "putting your children in today's public school is child abuse" camp anyway, so....

Picking Steve Bannon as his "Karl Rove". That's very much a sign this is not going to be a business as usual administration, as you can see from the Left's and the establishment's (but I repeat myself) total freak-out over that.

Citizens United ended a ban on core political speech, quite literally the government in oral arguments said it could be used to ban books, and it was specifically used to ban a movie about a candidate while she was running for office. Getting "money out of politics" is a pipe dream, but this was about silencing certain segments of the nation, and absent that decision by the Supremes it's hard to see how a civil war wouldn't have resulted sooner or later. That's the sort of thing that happens when you make it impossible for people to participate in the political process, at least, people who aren't going to surrender once that sort of thing happens. TL;DR: don't mess with the Bill of Rights.

That overturning Roe v. Wade is a consideration of his picks is hardly "solely"; long ago he published an initial list of suitable candidates, they're not one dimensional.

But while we're at it, you're eager to kill a core 1st Amendment political speech right while supporting a right literally conjured from the "penumbras" and "emanations" of other constitutional rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut). I don't see how there can be any meeting of minds between the two of us.

> The exiling of Chris Christie from a position of responsibility in the transition team, and the termination of many (or all?) of his people on the transition team. That was very much a drain the swamp thing.

No, it was very much a personal score settling thing. If it was a drain the swamp thing, the people left behind after the purge wouldn't have been just as covered in muck as those purged.

It bothers me how people don't understand (or don't believe in) the principles of law.

Law means that there are objective rules to behavior, which don't take into account positive intent, goal, or player.

That's why we have to put up with hate speech, so that not "politically correct" regular speech will be legal.

Same thing here.

If you don't want there to be a "truth committee" which clears all news before publication, you better hope that corporations have freedom of speech. If corporations don't have freedom of speech, then neither does the EFF, ACLU, or your posts on Facebook.

Thanks for your boost to my point about freedom of speech, but mine was more narrow, i.e. almost all large groups of people acting in concert form corporations for all the usual reasons. Exceptions include institutions that far predate corporations, like the Roman Catholic Church, where each Archbishop personally owns the resources of his see for the duration of his holding the position, which was why the Church entered an amicus curiae in the prosecution of Sun Myung Moon, the precedent established would allow the government to throw every Archbichop in prison, and they have far too much experience with that and worse happening....

So these include the National Rifle Association, a 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation, which is one way America's gun owners combine for collective political action. And which as I recall also filed an amicus curiae in Citizens United, McCain-Feingold very specifically targeted them (McCain, and I assume Feingold, hated it, and if not then, then I would assume for the latter now, after his unexpected failure to return to the Senate).

I believe the ACLU works in a similar fashion.

Indeed they do, the national ACLU proper is a 501(c)(4) like the NRA, and both have 501(c)(3) charities for stuff that fits with and is legal to do under those constraints. E.g. the NRAs' does pro-bono legal work and the other "raises and donates money to outdoors groups and others such as ROTC programs, 4-H and Boy Scout groups" and in general funds education (and has been a contributor to the remarkable improvement in gun safety statistics).

Heh, and on the ACLU Wikipedia page, "In 2006, the ACLU of Washington State joined with a pro-gun rights organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, and prevailed in a lawsuit against the North Central Regional Library District (NCRL) in Washington for its policy of refusing to disable restrictions upon an adult patron's request."

I'm sure this happened because a) the Second Amendment Foundation's 2 activities are running an important annual conference and b) lawsuits, and they're in Washington state.

And in either case, government censorship of their core political speech, which in theory reflects that of their members (not always entirely true for the NRA), is intolerable and why Citizens United was absolutely necessary.

He owes the political establishment nothing, yet his cabinet picks are all dyed-in-the-wool Republican insiders.

The claim sounds incompatible with reality.

He's picked 3 out of 15, it's a little early to be so confident about your opinion. Or that he'll run a Cabinet based government vs. e.g. something more in the direction of what Obama did. Or that he won't "fire fast" if they don't perform or fulfill whatever promises he made to them, as Chris Christie found out. This is, after all, the guy who won the election because he went through 3 campaign managers, not despite it.

And Sessions may be a "dyed-in-the-wool Republican insider", more specifically a de jure member of the establishment, but his positions on immigration put him well outside of the de facto establishment.

I'd never even heard of Wilbur Ross before he was picked, he's not a notable "dyed-in-the-wool Republican insider", in fact, being "a trustee of the Brookings Institution" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/24/...) makes him anything but that. Heck, per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ross#Political_activiti...):

Ross served under U.S. President Bill Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund, and later, under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as the Mayor's privatization advisor. In January 1998 he put $2.25 million in seed money into McCaughey Ross's campaign.[citation needed, and I add she is a Republican, but obviously of the NY variety] Although he was an early supporter of Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign, Ross in earlier years was a registered Democrat, served as an officer of the New York State Democratic Party and held fundraisers for Democratic candidates at his apartment in New York City.

It is absolutely, totally, and completely wrong to claim he is a "dyed-in-the-wool Republican insider".

His Education Secretary pick is a Common Core fan, that's enough for me (as in, not in a good way at all), but see my other comment about the current state of US K-12 public education. On the other hand, she seems best known for pushing private school vouchers (another bad idea, he who pays the piper picks the tune), but that's definitely not a partisan issue, plenty of Democrats are for it.

Just because some of their positions put them outside the current political orthodoxy doesn't mean they are not well within the orthodox power structure.

The Tea Party was a fringe 'grassroots' movement a few years ago - also intended to clean up government. Once it got elected, it was back to the same old GOP, just with a refreshed mandate for 'no new taxes ever'.

The real Tea Party was enthusiastically suppressed by the full establishment, and the IRS's part of that continues to this very day, it's been slapped down in the courts in a ruling within the last few weeks.

Establishment politicians claiming the mantle of the Tea Party used that to get elected in the notable 2010-14 elections, and you're shocked, shocked that professional politicians lied? Quelle horreur!

And didn't notice that when presented with such blatant betrayal, the Republican base picked a non-professional politician as its Presidential nominee, who ran on a non-establishment platform, in the face of a near total revolt of the GOPe outside of Reince Priebus and enough of the RNC, and, you know, won the election?

Let me turn this around: who specifically would you recommend as being outside of the "orthodox power structure" for his cabinet picks?

Heck, is Trump, according to you, by definition part of the "orthodox power structure"? Did getting elected President make him so, if not earlier? Just what are you asking for?

And yet, despite the rejection of establishment politics by the electorate, these establishment politicians keep getting re-elected.

This election, neo-liberalism was what was rejected - not the establishment.

> Heck, is Trump, according to you, by definition part of the "orthodox power structure"?

That power structure was created to serve the interests of people like him. How could he not be? He's a well-connected, politically-vocal billionaire, who is not at all squeamish about being surrounded by the perception of corruption and impropriety - and he hasn't even taken office yet. How on Earth could we expect anything better when he will?

People keep saying he is not a politician - but that is only true in the sense that he hasn't held public office. Neither has Newt Gingrich (For the past 16 years).

> The Tea Party was a fringe 'grassroots' movement a few years ago - also intended to clean up government.

The Tea Party was Koch-funded astroturf.

So that's why the IRS went after them, instead of the Koch brothers?

No, not even close. It was the first serious, spontaneous, "modern era?"; let's say, 21st Century grassroots reaction to the crimes of our ruling class, and was, as I noted, brutally suppressed (really, you think Koch brothers were paying all those people to rally, and to pick up their trash after they were finished???).

Now the reaction is Trump. If he fails, the ruling class will like what comes next even less, and things will start to edge to existential for them, "history history is the graveyard of aristocracies" and all that. One reason their freak-outs are intensifying.

And, yes, I'm now shifting a bit and focusing more on the wider ruling class than the political "establishment" per se, for that's really what we're fighting, much of what's wrong with today's America doesn't emit from the halls of the Congress, the decisions of the Supremes, etc. etc.

For example, suppose the press had treated this actual IRS suppression like they treated Nixon's asking the IRS to attack his enemies, which they of course refused to do.

(Note the wording of the articles of impeachment, that which he "endeavoured" to do, vs. actually did: http://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment (this is something I followed in real time back then...), or e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon's_Enemies_List#Purpose Nixon was not popular or powerful enough to carry this off.)

> No, not even close. It was the first serious, spontaneous, "modern era?"; let's say, 21st Century grassroots reaction to the crimes of our ruling class, and was, as I noted, brutally suppressed (really, you think Koch brothers were paying all those people to rally, and to pick up their trash after they were finished???).

No, it was not. Occupy Wall Street was.

Unlike Occupy, the Tea Party was very easy to turn to serve the needs of the ruling class - just play up the 'no new taxes' and 'small government' bits, and downplay the 'find the people who broke the economy, and punish them' outrage.

The result was that outrage over 2008 turned into another spoke in the GOP tentpole.

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